In a bid to ensure food security and sustainability in the country, Farmerline has launched a campaign dubbed ‘support a farmer initiative’ to raise GH¢1million to support farmers in the country.
Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and co-founder of Farmerline, Alloysius Attah, noted that Ghana – and for that matter Africa – tends to suffer in terms of access to foodstuffs when crises hit the global space.
Therefore, to reduce overdependence on imports and be able to produce enough to food sustain us and also export some to generate more revenue for the country, Farmerline has been working with over 800 farmers during the last 10 years, and has found it prudent to raise funds to assist farmers in the country with capacity training, access to fertiliser and quality seeds among others.
Speaking at a ceremony to launch the initiative, Mr. Attah noted that the ‘support a farmer initiative’ will go a long way to benefit farmers and also ensure there is food security in the country.
“We are here because we want to take the food security of our future into our own hands, and that is inspiring; we are not going to wait for anybody to come and solve this issue. I am concerned because the price of food keeps going up. We should work hard not to be at the suffering end. We have enough land and resources to grow our own food, take care of ourselves, and reduce our dependency on others.
“We believe that food security must be sustainable; we can generate resources from it and give support to keep it going so that you don’t always depend on donations. This is a very specific case; we are doing this one time to get the public to support farmers and also emphasise the need for us to make food security sustainable.
“Our goal is to raise GH₵1 million in the next four weeks, to enable us provide information, financing, quality fertiliser and seeds to the farmers,” he said.
Contributions to the initiative by the public are expected to be done via the ‘Chango App’ developed by an IT Consortium whose work or solutions are geared toward the improvement of people’s lives. Chief of Information Security Officer (CISO), IT Consortium, Ato Yawson, explained to B&FT the reason for the partnership with Farmerline.
“IT Consortium is all about people; we take pride in improving the lives of people in the best way we can, and we find ourselves in the technology environment. If you look at all the solutions we have provided, they are geared toward making people better. When we heard of Farmerline, we decided this is a good initiative that is going to help our farmers. We can’t be there physically, but through technology we can help people mobilise the funds to support the farmers,” Mr. Yawson said.
“As a farmer, I think this is a very brilliant initiative. In the last three months I’ve been touring the country and speaking to farmers, and their main problem is access to fertiliser. There is fertiliser but the price is ridiculously high, so they can’t afford it; and so this initiative is definitely going to help them go back to the crops that need fertiliser at a much subsidised rate,” said actor and farmer John Dumelo.
