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Livelihood Support

Farm Support Scheme

The United Nations predicts acute food insecurity in countries including those of West Africa over the next few years.  Since Ghana has good growing conditions and abundant labour, Ashanti Development created a Farm Support Project to take advantage of these.

In each participating village, up to 20 farmers become full participants and receive  four years of agricultural and marketing training, and loans to buy quality farm inputs.  They must repay the loans with interest at every harvest, after which money plus interest are loaned to them again.  At the end of four years, the project closes but moves – with the loan fund – to a new village and the cycle is repeated.  In this way the project is self-sustaining. 

Within the first year of training, crops typically double or treble and hunger is eradicated from participating villages.  After four years, villages no longer need our help and many farmers have become relatively wealthy.  The Ghana Government recently sent observers to inspect our scheme and incorporated elements of it into Ghana’s Agricultural Strategy.

Although no more than twenty farmers per village can be full participants in the scheme, typically twice as many attend the formal lessons as observers.  These include non-participating farmers from the village as well as farmers from outlying villages and since our model is easy to follow good practice spreads fast. 

By 2025, the scheme was operating, or had been completed, in 79 villages.

 

Microcredit and Small Businesses

Yen Daakye – meaning Our Future – is the name Ashanti women originally chose for this project, which was launched in 2009.  It provides women in selected villages with training in numeracy and business management.

The scheme offers three sequential loans, enabling many women to become economically independent.   Most of the loans are used for trading or small-scale farming, or for making fast food for hungry farmers at the end of their working day.  

So far, Yendaakye covers 36 villages.  Progress is slow because each woman needs time to pay back three or four loans before the project moves on – but in the meantime some of their enterprises expand rapidly and several of the women have become (relatively) wealthy.

Hardship

The full benefits of many of our projects will not be felt for several years.  In the meantime, we fear for the wellbeing of the old, the sick, the disabled and otherwise vulnerable. In the knowledge that this project is unsustainable, we now give a small pension to selected villagers in some communities.

Dressmaking School

Not all students are academic, but there’s not much choice of occupation for those who aren’t to marry or to work on the family farm. To offer a third alternative, Ashanti Development built a dressmaking school, which is presided over by a professional tailor, Kofi Boampong. 

Most of the students are unmarried mothers, many of whom had arduous lives collecting firewood and carrying it on their heads to sell in the nearest market. So far, twenty students have passed through the school, of whom eight have set up their own dressmaking businesses.

Ashanti Development often buys the products of the dressmaking school and sells them in the UK to make extra money for the charity.  We have a stall every Saturday in Camden Market and sell through several other retail outlets.

Beekeeping

We have trained more than 100 beekeepers through our tried-and-tested beekeeping  programme.  We have also trained a dedicated beekeeper to carry on the work and deal with problems in our absence.  

Our dress-making school makes protective bee suits, while a local timber mill cuts wood for assembly into beehives and stands for them to rest on.

The project produces a number of small-scale enterprises and one or two which earn enough to extend their houses or put their children through school.