Ghana Benefits From Food Security Package

Ghana has benefited from a US$21 million package from the US government to design and implement food security strategies and investment plans.

The package is expected to be used for training and building the capacity of professionals to ensure food security in the country for agricultural-led growth in the long term.

The facility, which forms part of a compact to be extended to other West African countries including Senegal, Nigeria, Liberia and Mali, is aimed at investing in people through institutions to undertake courses in capacity building and training to help in the scaling up of food security.

Under the NEPAD Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADEP) the package is designed to support Africa to scale up its food security by ensuring that institutions involved in the business of agriculture are well resourced to meet global food challenges.

To that end, African leadership training and capacity building programme involving participants from Ghana, Nigeria and Liberia was held to provide training to strengthen the capacity of African professionals to assume leadership roles in their institutions to move the CAADEP agenda forward.

The programme is under the US government’s Feed the future (FTF) initiative, which marks a radical departure from the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) customary level of engagement with host country governments.

Presenting an overview of the programme, the Deputy Chief of Party of AFRICAN LEAD, a capacity building arm of the FTF initiative, Mrs. Carla Denizard, said the initiative operated in three regions with offices in Ghana, Kenya and South Africa.

She explained that it was to build the capacity of leaders to prioritise key activities and implement country investment plans with the NEPAD’s CAADP framework.

Her outfit, she noted, sought to ensure that sufficient leaders were trained to maintain a critical mass of food security ‘champions’ who would drive agriculture-led development.

Among the key areas of deliberations of the training, according to Mrs. Denizard, are a course for multi and cross-sectoral change agents about the CAADP process, as well as how to deepen the understanding of country compacts and investment plans.

The training, she added, were developed in modules under which there were topics such as assessing capacity needs and developing a training database.

The USAID Mission Director for West Africa, Mr. Patrick Henderson, who was the special guest, said more than one billon people who constituted one sixth of the world’s population suffered from chronic hunger with devastating and far-reaching effects.

On that score, he said at the July 2009 G8 summit in Italy, the US President, Mr. Barack Obama pledged at least US$3.5 billion to combat food insecurity, which led to the birth of the ‘Feed The Future’ programe.

The Director of Policy Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation at the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Mr. Ram Ebo Bhavnami, who represented Mr. Kwesi Ahwoi, the Minster of Food and Agriculture, said Ghana was heavily investing in the agriculture sector to forestall any future risk.

Source: Daily Graphic