Government called upon to employ AEAs

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.