Overview
Ghana is located in West Africa and is considered one of the more political and economically stable countries in the region. Although it is still officially classified as a low-income food deficit country, over the past two decades, Ghana has made significant progress both in halving poverty from 58 to 29 percent and in reducing undernourishment from 64 percent in 1979 to 18 percent in 2006.
If this progress is sustained, the country will be on track to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty and hunger by 2015.
However, these impressive national achievements conceal a wide socio-economic gap between the southern and northern sections of the country. Ghana’s northern regions face grim poverty and severe seasonal food shortages.
The main occupation in this area is rain-fed farming which is carried out at a subsistence level and is confined to a short rainy season. As a result, most people are vulnerable to chronic food insecurity and abject poverty for the most part of the year. Five out of ten people in the Northern Region are considered poor. The figure climbs up to nine out of ten people in the Upper West Region, the poorest part of the country. Nearly half of all children under five years of age are malnourished, more than twice the national average.
Recurrent natural disasters such as severe droughts and floods in 2007, coupled with global food and fuel price volatility in 2008, further heightened vulnerability to poverty, hunger and disease, as most people in northern Ghana were unable to cope and had resort to a reduction in the quality, and quantity of their meals.
WFP activities
WFP is currently implementing a Country Programme (2006-2010) which supports the Government of Ghana in the education and health sectors. An Emergency Operation is being implemented to assist victims of floods/droughts and high food prices, whilst a Protracted Relief and Recovery Operation is supporting refugees from some neighboring West African countries.
WFP Ghana is also scaling-up local procurement from farmers while developing the implementation strategy for its Purchase for Progress programme (P4P), which will specifically direct food purchases to small-scale farmers. All WFP’s programmes are implemented in partnership with the national, regional and district levels of the Government of Ghana, other UN agencies and non-governmental organizations.
- Support for basic education
School Meals: WFP collaborates with the Ghana School Feeding Programme to provide one nutritious meal a day to 100,000 pupils in primary and junior high school in Ghana’s three northern regions.
All the food required for this programme is purchased within the country in support of the government’s objective of making the school feeding programme ‘home-grown’ and also in line with WFP’s current strategy of maximizing the use of its purchasing power to promote sustainable development of food security. WFP Ghana hopes to buy US$10 million worth of food commodities needed for this programme from Ghanaian farmers and agro-processors between 2006 and 2010. The school feeding programme thus contributes to the improvement of education, increase of farmers’ incomes and the development of local agro-processing markets.
Take-Home rations for girls: In the 2008/2009 academic year, 18,000 girls in upper primary and junior high school are being provided with take-home food rations to encourage higher rates of girls’ school enrolment, attendance and retention. This programme, which began in 1999, has significantly contributed to the attainment of gender parity in Ghana’s three northern regions. Consequently, it is gradually being phased-out and will be replaced with the national school feeding programme.
- Maternal and early childhood nutrition
Supplementary Feeding, Health and Nutrition Education: Malnutrition is a serious health problem affecting large numbers of women and young children in northern Ghana. Some of the major causes which have been identified are low dietary intake, inappropriate weaning practices, household food insecurity and parasitic infections.
To address this problem, WFP has been working with the Ghana Health Service since 1995 to provide nutritious food to pregnant and nursing women, and children under five years of age who are at risk of malnutrition. In over 200 communities, 60,000 women and children receive complementary fortified foods during the lean season while children between the ages of 2 and 5 are provided with one cooked nutritious meal every weekday. Key food commodities are fortified with micro-nutrients such as iron, iodine and Vitamin A to prevent vitamin and mineral deficiencies which are silent killers of many in developing countries. Food assistance serves as an incentive to motivate women to regularly attend nutrition and health education sessions, where they receive pre and post-natal health care services, growth monitoring and immunizations.
WFP’s activities in the health and education sectors are linked through common geographical targeting in order to achieve the life-cycle approach to nutrition. This approach ensures the provision of nutritious food to children right from the womb through adolescence.
- Emergency Operation:
WFP is targeting 215,000 people affected by droughts, floods and high food prices with food assistance up until April 2009. A livelihood support component provided small-scale farmers with food assistance, in order to prevent the consumption of seeds needed for planting and enabled agricultural rehabilitation, and self-sufficiency at the household level.
- Protracted Relief and Recovery Operation:
A Protracted Relief and Recovery Operation, provides food assistance to some 14,200 Liberian, Togolese and other refugees, who fled to Ghana for refuge from the civil strife in their countries.
- Supporting local farmers and agro-processors
Local procurement and support to the agro-processing industry: WFP Ghana plans to buy a minimum of 60 percent of the food commodities required for its country programme, within Ghana. This falls in line with WFP’s corporate strategy of maximizing the use of purchasing power to promote sustainable development of food security, especially for small-scale farmers. Local procurement increased from US$200,000 in 2003 to nearly US$6 million in 2008. Efforts are also being made to build the capacity of the local agro-processing industries, to produce fortified food commodities such as corn soya blend, maize meal, iodized salt and palm oil, both commercially and at the local level. Furthermore, WFP is facilitating linkages between manufacturers, small-scale farmers and women’s groups, to strengthen and develop a reliable and cost-effective retail and food supply chain.
