Farmers in Ghana will now heave a sigh of relief following the launch of EVOCA (Environmental Virtual Observatories for Connective Action) and waterapps which is a collaborative interdisciplinary project of Wageningen University, University for Development studies, IITA, MDF West Africa, KITE-Ghana and other partner institutions.
Following inception in 2016, the project teams have been working with PhDs from Wageningen University to develop three EVOs; two for hydro-climatic information provision and the third for extension service delivery.
The rational for the project is that people in rural Ghana face social, economic and political challenges in sustaining their livelihoods. But the natural environments on which they depend are also under pressure affecting biodiversity, health, agriculture and water systems, endangering the subsistence of many agrarian societies.
The feasibility, design and testing of the EVOs was done in collaboration with farmers, water managers, extension officers, financial service operators and other actors at the local level in selected communities across the country.
According to Prof. Fulco Ludwig and Dr. Annemarie van Paassen, representatives of the core research team, the ICT-based platforms will enable users to share environmental information across media networks and facilitating connective action among dissociated populations.
The platforms allow linking science-based models of dynamic natural processes with participatory monitoring and broad information accessibility. Prof. Fulco was emphatic about the strategic partnership been built with District Assemblies and Community Based Organizations to ensure local ownership of these innovations.
To support water management in farming systems in Northern, Andy Bonaventure Nyamekye and Emmanuel Nyadzi have designed an EVO in collaboration with actors in the Kumbungu District under the EVOCA project.
They maintained that “Meteorological forecasting services have been in operation for some time in the country but this according to farmers is insufficient in terms of accuracy, timing, and reliability to support their farm decision making. Also, farmers rely on indigenous ecological knowledge to predict weather/climate patterns but are the first to recognize its limitations” hence the project EVOCA.
“The objective of this project is to make weather and seasonal climate forecast actionable for individual farmers, communities and irrigated water managers engaged in rice production in northern Ghana. In this project, we seek to harmonize scientific and indigenous people forecast to improve forecast accuracy and acceptability among farmers. The unique approach in this project is the use of an android digital tool and the inclusion of citizen science approach in hydro-climatic data and information exchange. This will address the argument that science should not be a one-directional effort, where it produces new knowledge and information and makes it accessible for end-users but rather interactive, where science and practice co-design, co-create and co-produce knowledge by bringing in different forms of expertise”.
Two other researchers, on the EVOCA project, Chris Agyekumhene and Nyamwaya Munthali, have been working on enhancing (Digital) delivery of services to smallholder farmers in maize farming systems in the Brong Ahafo Region.
They maintained that the Ghanaian agricultural sector’s capacity to respond to sector needs and emerging challenges (e.g., climate change effects – drought, emergence of exotic pests) is hampered by the country’s historic and prevailing extension service delivery approach, which faces several challenges. To enhance the sector’s performance, extension delivery must innovate beyond linear knowledge transfer; an approach that is limited in facilitating communication among wider stakeholders (various actors in agricultural research and development) to engage in knowledge sharing, joint problem solving and coordinated action.
Nonetheless, Ghana is growing as the West African Information Communication Technology (ICT) hub amidst an African new-ICT revolution. The new-ICT revolution presents opportunities to revitalise extension service delivery in Ghana at a lower cost than prevailing mechanisms, because new-ICTs can act as bridging mechanisms to connect actors and facilitate their interaction.
New-ICTs could be particularly significant in advancing broader extension roles to include critical farmer needs such as credit and market access as well as knowledge brokering.
Therefore, “we study new-ICTs to establish their role in responding to challenges in service delivery to smallholder farmers in Ghana’s maize farming systems. More specifically, the project takes stock of the new-ICT applications available in the maize farming system and value chain, their use in context, to ultimately identify and develop/adapt promising applications for service delivery to smallholder farmers”.
Also on the Waterapps project being implemented at Ada East District, Ghana are two researchers Talardia Gbangou and Rebecca Sarku who maintained that Water for agriculture in peri-urban delta areas is vital to safeguard sustainable food production.
However, the dynamics of urbanisation in the delta, climate change, and weather and climate variability in the form of too much, not enough, too late, or early rainfall is affecting adaptive decision-making in farming.
As a result, farmers in the Volta delta of Ghana cannot rely only on their own experience anymore to support their decision-making in farming. The Waterapp team have developed an experimental tailor-made weather and climate forecasts information services with and for farmers in peri-urban areas in the urbanising deltas of the Volta river basin.
A real-time experimentation of the co-production of weather forecasts information approach is adopted with various actors (farmers, agricultural and meteorological extensions agents, scientists, and apps developers). Scientific information is acquired from weather models while traditional knowledge comes from farmers’ observations and experience.
Web and mobile applications are co-design and used to facilitate the data collection and interaction among the co-creation actors. This will give room for the evaluation of weather and climate information access, relevance, usability, usefulness and uptake based on the case study.
The project teams have indicated the possible readiness of these applications in the coming months for use by all Ghanaians especially farmers, insurance companies, Banks and other public and private institutions in the Country.