The Road to the Horizon: Ghana

Showing posts with label Ghana. Show all posts

Farmers adapting to climate change:
Naakpi Kuunwena from Ghana

His name is written “Naakpi” and pronounced “Naakwi”, that we understood fast. But it took us much longer to comprehend why Naakpi looked so tired, and walked around with a back bent as if he had a burden too heavy for one man to carry.

We understood even less as we walked through an opening in the earth wall surrounding his farm and stepped onto his vegetable field: This one hectare plot was the largest, greenest and best maintained vegetable field we had seen so far. The cabbage, beans, tomato, peppers all stood in straight lines. A perfectly geometric maze of five inch wide irrigation canals divided the field into small sub-plots devour of any weeds.

All of us stood in awe. The sight of green that lush came as a surprise. So far, during our West-Africa trip for the Adaptation and Mitigation Knowledge Network (AMKN), we had been interviewing farmers harvesting at this time, one to two months into the dry season. Here, in Lawra – Northeast Ghana, it had been no different. But Naakpi still had a green plot. Why then did it not make him a happy man?

“This is by far the nicest plot I have seen so far, Naakpi”, I said, and congratulated him. He looked at me with sad eyes and shrugged: “Give it one more month, and I will loose it all”, he said. He told us the story. (...)

Read my full post on the CCAFS blog...

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Farmers adapting to climate change:
Joel Yiri from Ghana

After his first two sentences, I knew Joel Yiri from Jirapa was the man I was looking for. I had asked Peter Kuupenne, an extension officer from Ghana’s Ministry of Food and Agriculture, to meet “a creative farmer”. And that is what I found: Joel was a man with a vision.

As we shook hands, and sat down in front of Joel’s house, he introduced himself in perfect English. I asked him how come, and if maybe he had been a teacher. But he shook his head: “You know, over here, you are born as a farmer’s son, so that’s what you do for your life: you farm. Just as your father and your father’s father. But that also includes the core challenge: with the current climate change, we can’t farm anymore like they did. We need to adapt our methods. Our fathers had fertile grounds. The rains were plentiful, and for generations they used the same tools, the same seeds and the same technologies. Our generation needs to change.” (...)

Read my full post on the CCAFS blog...

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Kids in Ghana -
Smiles worth a thousand words

Ghana kids in a school

Two weeks ago, we were driving in a remote ares, near Jirapa, on Ghana's North-East border with Burkina Faso. As we slowed down to negotiate a series of mudholes, I saw a car coming from the other side with a familiar emblem on the side. I waved them to stop.

They were a WFP team on their way to check one of their school feeding programmes. I guess they were as surprised to see me there, as I was to meet them, in the middle of nowhere.

We followed them to the school, and took the opportunity to shoot some pictures and do a video interview with the school in the background.

Some of the pictures. I just loved their smiles...

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An update from the African dust tracks

Mali village chief

We did not have too much connectivity during this trip, so could not post regular updates. I will catch up during next week.

During this trip, we interviewed 17 farmers and people who assisted farmers to adapt to climate changes.
After over 2,000 km, half of it off road, I am writing this from Ouagadougou while we are waiting for the flight back to Europe.

Next week we will start editing the videos.

I still wanted to share some pictures from this trip.

Mali nomad with his cattle

A nomad in Mali with his cattle

Cattle keeper in Ghana

Yousif in Ghana spoke about the difficulties to find grazing grounds for his cattle

Jumuo and his fruit trees in Ghana

Jumuo in Ghana described the way the shortened rains had insects attack his fruit trees up to the level they would no longer bear any fruits.

Naakpi and his vegetable garden in Ghana

Naakpi and his vegetable garden in Ghana

While Naakpi stood in front of his large green vegetable field, he told us how most of it would be lost, as the rains had stopped, and the water level was too low to continue irrigating the crop.

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Googling via SMS

hands free gsm

From the Google Africa Blog:

In Africa, we've learned that mobile phones are easier to get to than internet connections and PCs, and that working towards our mission means working through mobile phones.

At the beginning of 2008, there were over a quarter of a billion mobile subscribers on the continent. Mobile penetration has risen from just one in 50 people at the beginning of this century to almost one third of the population today.

To that end, we are excited to launch a test of Google SMS Search in Ghana and Nigeria. (Full)

What this means is: in Ghana and Nigeria, you SMS keywords -just as you would enter them in the Google search bar in your browser- and you get an SMS back with the search results.

Here is a practical example of how it looks like.

A real tool, or a lure into higher SMS traffic?

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West-Africa Climate Change Adaptation and Food Security videos

Here are the testimonial videos we shot for the CCAFS project (Climate Change Adaptation and Food Security) in Ghana, Burkina Faso and Mali (West Africa).

Clip#1: Tidiane Diarra (Mali)