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Rural poverty in Ghana Poverty in Ghana is prevalently rural. Seventy per cent of the country’s
poor people live in rural areas, where they have limited access to
basic social services, safe water, all-year roads, electricity and
telephone services. The incidence of poverty is highest in the northern
parts of the country. The aged and the disabled, as well as people with HIV/AIDS and other chronically sick people, are another face of the rural poor. Many have no means of support or have exhausted their resources to pay for medical care. Migrants also are seriously affected by poverty. Where are Ghana’s rural poor people The poorest areas of Ghana are the savannah regions of the north, where many rural poor people face chronic food insecurity. In the northern part of Ghana, poverty often has a hold on entire rural communities. Livelihoods are more vulnerable in those regions, and all the members of the community suffer because of food insecurity for part of the year. The three poorest regions, the North, Upper East and Upper West, occupy the parts of Ghana bordering on Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso and Togo. In the Upper East region almost nine out of ten people live in poverty. More than eight out of ten people in the Upper West region are poor. In the Northern region, poverty affects seven out of ten people, and slightly less than half the population of the Central region is poor. The Upper East and Upper West regions are covered by sahel savannah in the north-east and grassland savannah in the north-west. There is one short rainy season, followed by a long period of dry weather influenced by the dry harmattan wind from the Sahara Desert. Farmers live generally at the subsistence level, and farming is confined mainly to the short rainy season. In the dry season farmers can cultivate land only under irrigation. Most farmers are idle during this period, and many able-bodied young people migrate to other parts of the country to earn an income. Throughout Ghana, rural people cope with poverty in various ways, finding individual solutions to the problem. Men take off-farm employment, women carry on small-scale trading, and families reduce cash spending, which may mean taking children out of school. Why are rural people poor? Among the causes of rural poverty, according to the government’s poverty reduction strategy paper, are low productivity and poorly functioning markets for agricultural outputs. Small-scale farmers rely on rudimentary methods and technology and they lack the skills and inputs such as fertilizer and improved seeds that would increase yields. Because of erosion and shorter fallow periods, soil loses its fertility, posing a long-term threat to farmers’ livelihoods and incomes. Increasing population pressure leads to continuous cultivation in the densely inhabited Upper East region and a shorter fallow period in the Upper West region, causing further deterioration of the land. A negligible number of farms (only about 6,000 out of several million) have access to irrigation. Land ownership and land security are regulated by complex systems that may vary widely (see Land tenure in Northern Ghana). Animals are of insufficiently productive genetic stock. Poor farmers are without market and rural infrastructure they desperately need for storing, processing and marketing their products. Source: IFAD |
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