Six Municipal and Districts Assemblies in the North East and Upper East Regions including West Mamprusi Municipal, Bongo, Kassena Nankana West, Talensi, Nabdam and Builsa South Districts have had over 6000 Smallholder farmers and over 4000 children in 12 communities benefit from a livelihood empowerment project by the Navrongo Bolgatanga Catholic Diocesan Development Organization.
The project; Strengthening of smallholder resilience towards a changing climate is supported by Misereor, a German agency and aims at improving food security, climate change resilience and improving child nutrition.
As part of the implementation of the project, the Livelihood and Advocacy Directorate of the Navrongo-Bolgatanga Catholic Diocese is focusing on support for farmer groups and development of farmer-based organizations, sustainable agricultural practices and promotion, enterprise development and climate change adaptation.
With the project hoping to make farmers climate change resilient, emphasis is placed on sustainable agricultural practices like bunding, compost production and application, other traditional farming methods like mixed farming, mixed cropping and non-burning of farm residue.
Following support from Kindermission of Germany, another component was introduced to support 12 communities with boreholes for women farmers in a bid to improve child nutrition and has reached out to over 4,000 children under five in six districts.
Dominic Aveah, Director for diocesan livelihood and Advocacy, sharing details of the project, said the vegetable production is done organically without the use of agro-chemicals with training on child nutrition among others.
He disclosed that the intention is to up-scale the project as they hope that other municipal and district assemblies will draw lessons from the project and implement same.
“This project is reaching out to 6,120 smallholder farmers and also have another component that is sponsored by Kindermission of Germany that is looking at women and children nutrition and hoping to improve nutrition of children under 5 and also reaching out to 4,100 children under five in six districts.
The approaches that we use in these two projects, for example the first one under climate resilience, we are looking at improving crop yields through sustainable agricultural practices, so we facilitate farmers to adopt the various sustainable agricultural practices such as compost, bonding, crop rotation and the rest.
Another approach is the use of local innovation as an alternative to agro-chemicals. So, we facilitate them to use local innovations that are being produced from local products that are organic to control diseases in livestock and in processing. Another, approach is looking at how to increase the income of smallholder farmers especially women using the saving and internal lending concept among other things like agro-processing”.
He said this in an interview with Dreamz News on the sidelines of a stakeholder’s conference organized by the Livelihood and Advocacy Directorate of the Navrongo- Bolgatanga Catholic Diocesan Development Organization under the theme; “Promoting Sustainable agriculture for food and nutrition security and building smallholder farmers resilience towards a changing climate” held at the Farmer Training Center in Pusu-Namogo, in the Talensi District of the Upper East Region.
