In March
2019 managers and partners of the Resilient Food Systems programme joined field
trips led by Ghana project – the Sustainable Land and Water Management
Project (SLWMP), as part of the Programme’s third annual workshop. Four
parallel teams visited different sites in the Upper East and Northern Regions
of the country: West Mamprusi and Mamprugu Moagduri Districts in the Northern
Region, Kassena Nankana West, Talensi, Builsa South, Bawku West Districts in
the Upper East Region.
The
participants had the opportunity to interact with farmers, community
chiefs and local government officials (Department of Agriculture) to learn
how local communities are benefitting from project activities.
Post-trip
feedback indicates that participants were highly impressed and valued the
South-South opportunity to exchange experiences on:
- Payment for ecosystem services
(PES)
- Women’s empowerment and gender
mainstreaming (e.g. within the shea tree value chain)
- SLWMP’s village savings/loans
programme
- The relevance of community
engagement to achieve impact
- Several specific
practices/techniques being spearheaded by the project, such as bee keeping
and the selection of particular tree species according to different
contexts
Key lessons learned from
field trips
Payments
for Ecosystem Services (PES)
- Promotion of wood lots through
PES approach
- PES can be made more
sustainable
- PES but with payments not
coming from project budget
- Need to consider specific tree
species in tree planting CPES
Knowledge
management and community involvement
- The need for greater sharing of
experience, particularly in the regions
- Input supply systems and
extension services innovations; community involvement
- Actively engaging communities
at all levels of the project conception/design, implementation and
monitoring and assessment
- Community involvement in
attainable land and water management
Sustaining
projects by community members
- Gender mainstreaming
- Women’s empowerment
- The autonomy of women through
the activity is transformed honey-karite
- The participation of women in
implementation of sustainable land management technologies to improve
their livelihood and income
Village
Savings and Loan Associations
- The use of cooperatives for
financial savings was an important aspect for ensuring sustainability of
the project
- Natural Resource Management ,
agroforestry and beekeeping
- Grassland establishment
- Improved pasture quality for
animals
- Protecting the planted trees
with wire mesh to avoid damage by animals
- The need to factor boreholes
into future proposals
- The technique of making compost
- Bottle watering for
agroforestry
- Bee keeping processing,
packaging
- Planting trees with economic
value/benefits
- The dual purpose machine used
to process shea nut and fried mango
Impact
- Consolidate investments (avoid
spread over more villages) to ensure more impact; Link interventions to
value chain development/promotion
- Making it easier for
stakeholders to demonstrate impact
- Need to employ/adopt
complementary interventions
- Possibility of spreading the
technology beyond project communities as far as possible
Additional resources: