Government called upon to employ AEAs

Tamale, Aug 17, GNA –
Mr Francis Essuman, the Northern Regional Coordinator of the USAID Advance
project has called on the government to employ more Agriculture Extension
Agents (AEAs) to support the small farmers to improve on agriculture.

He said currently,
AEAs from the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) was inadequate, which was
affecting the smallholder farmers who produced close to 80 per cent of the food
crops in the country.

Mr Essuman made the
call during a regional stakeholders’ dialogue forum on access to extension
service to smallholder farmers in the Northern region.

The event held in
Tamale was organised by Urbanet Ghana in collaboration with USAID Advance
Project to enable stakeholders to make further inputs into the results for
purpose of promoting effective and efficient delivery of extension services for
increased production and productivity of farmers in the region.

He urged stakeholders
to support the government to ensure effective and efficient delivery of
agricultural extension services to smallholder farmers in the rural areas to
assess quality information to improve agriculture sector.

Mr Zakaria Rashid, the
Executive Director of Urbanet Ghana noted that the departments of agriculture
should explore other innovative ways especially using of ICT, mobile
applications, digital platforms to deliver extension messages to farmers.

He said the department
of agriculture should work with farmers to identify volunteers and train them
as liaisons to facilitate community mobilisation for extension delivery.

He said there was need
for MOFA to work closely with the farmer associations and nucleus farmers that
had already set-up networks to facilitate learning to ensure that farmers were
mobilised to participate in the process for learning and experience sharing
programmes.

GNA