Ghana moves ahead with the CAADP sustainable land management program

The Government of Ghana has officially confirmed its commitment to developing a multi-sectoral approach to combating land degradation and the scaling-up of sustainable land management (SLM) investments, in line with the NEPAD-TerrAfrica approach under Pillar 1 of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP).

Following the conclusions and recommendations of the Country Environmental Analysis (CEA), and as a result of the continuous policy dialogue conducted both regionally and nationally, the idea and rationale for developing a programmatic response to address land degradation and to promote SLM has been progressively internalised by the Government of Ghana.

The new architecture of development assistance in Ghana is in fact shifting toward budgetary support and sector-wide programs to strengthen country systems and reduce the transaction costs of dealing with multiple partners and projects.

The Government, in officially confirming its commitment to developing a multi-sectoral programmatic framework, requested support to develop such a framework.

In response a TerrAfrica Advisory Service mission, comprising the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Bank, travelled to Ghana in March 2007.

At the conclusion of this mission, the development of an Investment Framework for SLM (CSIF) was agreed as an important first step.

An inter-ministerial SLM Task Force chaired by the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Environment has been established to coordinate and oversee the CSIF formulation process.

The joint mission of the TerrAfrica partners in March 2007 highlighted the urgent need to align and harmonise initiatives under NEPAD’s CAADP and the SLM country process.

A NEPAD mission to Ghana is following up on the overall development of the CAADP roundtable process as well as specifically the progress being made in the implementation of the road map for the CSIF.

The mission will also aim to relate to and reflect on the issues and action points agreed upon in the March 2007 joint TerrAfrica partners mission, as well as to review and learn from Ghana’s strategies and progress made in moving the CAADP implementation process forward.

It will further identify areas of collaboration and NEPAD/ECOWAS support that could be required to (a) strengthen and speed up country CAADP implementation processes and (b) link and align Ghana’s initiatives to mutual regional programmes and processes.

CAADP Pillar 3: Food and nutrition security
Home Grown School Feeding Programme

The Government of Ghana in its strategy to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), especially of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger and achieving universal primary education initiated a pilot home-grown school feeding programme (HGSFP) in 10 public primary schools, one from each region of the country, in September 2005, striving for the formation of a national school feeding programme linked to local food production.

The programme has been expanded to 200 schools covering 69,280 pupils (as at August 2006), with plans to reach 500 schools. The HGSFP aims to increase school enrolments while promoting increased food production, marketing and demand in rural food insecure areas in the country.

Even though the HGSFP might not be yet ready to be labelled as a ‘model’, there is strong consensus that there are lessons to be harnessed and documented from which other countries can learn.

During the March 2007 NEPAD/WFP mission to Ghana, the Ghana Government informally declared its interest in hosting such a meeting. This development has been confirmed and the meeting will be held during the first week of October 2007 in Accra. Source : nepad, july 30, 2007