Ghana

Progress and Activities

2009 Updates

• Ghana Joins the 'SRI Club'
Kwabena Adu Broni has reported on the first SRI evaluation in Ghana, at Aboso-Odumase in the Western Region, a very humid area with little tradition of rice-growing and where usual rice yields are usually very low.He planted half a hectare (5,000 m2) and harvested 2.2 tons of paddy with 20% moisture content. Recalculating this to 14% moisture content gives a yield of 2.09 tons, or 4.18 t/ha. He sent a series of pictures of the crop at different stages of growth, from 40 days to 94 days. The tillering was very good, ranging from 54 to 85 tillers, Kwabena reports.

With friends and neighbors, Kwabena has formed the Future 12000 Farmers Union Trust for Rice Employment. Profits from the first year's crop were used to buy 1,000 day-old chicks to start a sideline business that could also provide chicken manure for the rice fields. Unfortunately, 600 of these died in the first few days. However, the group plans to continue working with the SRI methods, with more land made available by the traditional local authority.

Kwabena learned about SRI from a World Vision colleague who worked with CIIFAD under the Natural Resource Management and Sustainable Agriculture Partnership (NARMSAP). He got his initial information about SRI from the SRI website and email correspondence starting in 2003 and conducted a small SRI trial in 2007. Later that year he had a visit from Dr. Mustapha Ceesay, director of research for the National Agricultural Research Institute of The Gambia. Kwabena credits his success this past season to the agronomic guidance that Mustapha was able to give him, based on Mustapha's work with SRI methods in The Gambia starting in 2000 See The Gambia page for further information.

Kwabena Broni in his SRI field from seedbed to maturity
(click on the pictures to enlarge)

	Kwabena Broni in his SRI nursery
SRI crop at 40 days
	SRI crop at 72 days
SRI crop at 85 days
	SRI crop at 94 days
Broni with mature SRI field

• SRI Lecture at GIDA by Visitor from Nippon Koei Indonesia Project
In January 2009, Shuichi Sato, who had supported SRI evaluation and dissemination in Eastern Indonesia 2002-2008 as Nippon Koei team leader for the Decentralized Irrigation System Improvement Project (see DISIMP data), visited Ghana for Nippon Koei. At the invitation of the Chief Executive of Ghana Irrigation Development Authority (GIDA) he gave a special lecture on SRI to 27 GIDA staff (shown at right). Some remembered the presentation on SRI that Norman Uphoff had made to GIDA in January 2001. There is now more interest, given economic conditions and needs, in SRI, so the agency intends to pursue SRI evaluation, possibly now with JICA assistance.

2007-2008 Updates

During 2007-08, the Japanese development consulting firm Nippon Koei carried out a study for JICA on the promotion of domestic rice production in Ghana. Some trials of SRI methods were carried out in the Ashaiman Irrigation Scheme east of Accra, under the management of the Ghana Irrigation Development Authority (GIDA). But unfortunately, these trials got flooded out because the site had not been selected well.

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