OIC International Given Lead Training Role in Ghana Agricultural Transformation Plan

OIC International will oversee training in an ambitious Agricultural Transformation Program in Ghana, the centerpiece of a five-year, $547 million compact between the Government of Ghana and the U.S. Government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). Dr. John Azu will serve as the lead consultant in content review, standardization and quality control for guidelines, training materials, and trainer manuals developed for training of some 1,200 Farmer Based Organizations, made up of 60,000 farmers. The Program reached a key milestone last month with the announcement that agricultural sector loans provided by the Bank of Ghana surpassed $1,000,000.

The Agricultural Transformation Program is the keystone of the Ghana Compact, and will modernize and encourage business in agriculture and reduce poverty in rural communities. It is designed to trigger a private sector-led transformation of Ghana’s agriculture and rural life and attract investment to increase farmer incomes, generate employment, and markedly reduce rural poverty. This will be accomplished by increasing the production and productivity of high-value cash and food staple crops in some of Ghana’s poorest regions and enhancing the competitiveness of Ghana’s agricultural products in regional and international markets.

OIC International will take the lead in creating training standards, designing training programs, training trainers, and creating materials for crop productivity improvement, field demonstrations, development of farmer-based organizations, and business literacy and numeracy. OIC International will also provide support to the Ministry of Food and Agriculture’s commercial development program for farmer-based organizations.

It was also announced in August that the Bank of Ghana had certified 35 financial institutions to participate in the credit program. A $40.7 million revolving credit facility for farmers and would-be farmers has been set aside to fuel the program. Beneficiaries under the credit facility may be farmer-based organizations, or micro, small or medium-sized enterprises.

These milestones mark the latest step in the two years since the MCA Ghana Compact was signed in August 2006 by the Government of Ghana and MCC, a U.S. bilateral development fund that receives monies appropriated by the United States Congress every year.

The three components of the Compact—agriculture, transportation, and rural development—are mutually reinforcing and provide an environment that should attract substantial parallel private investment from national and international sources. The Compact focuses on 23 districts of three of Ghana’s poorest regions: the Northern area, the central Afram Basin area, and the Southern Horticultural Belt area, where overall poverty rates average more than 40 percent (and up to 90 percent in parts of the North and Afram plains).

Under the Agricultural Transformation Initiative, 51,000 farm households will be trained in agri-business. The Compact anticipates an overall rate of return of 20 percent on investment, direct reduction of poverty for 230,000 Ghanaians, and improved livelihoods and welfare for one million Ghanaians.

DAI – a nearly four-decade-old Washington, DC area-based consulting firm– serves as the Central Management Consultant (CMC) of the Millennium Development Authority (MiDA), established by the Ghanaian government to implement Compact projects and to oversee the Millennium Challenge Account. DAI has partners with OIC International and MEL Consulting--a 10-year-old Ghana-based business management and development company that provides consultancy services to small enterprises and micro-finance institutions—to create a team that has the staff, technical approach, vision, and management systems to help meet the goals of the program.

"The successful implementation in Ghana of the Compact will launch an epochal transformation of my country’s agriculture into modernity not only in agricultural practices but also in value addition and agro-industrialization with great promise for enhanced productivity, commerce, food security, employment generation, rural development and poverty alleviation." HIS EXCELLENCY JOHN AGYEKUM KUFUOR, President of the Republic of Ghana .