In the rural community of Ghana, farmers produce so much but loss about 30-60% to wastage or spoilage to post harvest losses. My business started with the ideal of adding values to raw farm produce to extend the shelf-life of the produce income of rural farmers. So in my business, we add value to fruits and vegetables and process cosmetic products organically. To this we are establishing small cottage factories to add value of farm produce for processing fruits and vegetables and another factory for production of cosmetics and black soaps, this is to help create rural jobs for the women and the youths.
Many women and youths in the rural communities leaves the rural community because they have no jobs and in extreme poverty to big towns and cities where they want to take the chance to look for better economic opportunities, therefore leaving the village economy untapped and undeveloped.
Working with rural farmers and rural communities are very challenging as they are faced with many issues to remain economically viable in rural communities like having access to inputs, access to soft flexible finances and access to transferable technologies. The second part of my business is to to link rural farmers to inputs, and technologies on hire purchase and trying to link they up to funds for better performance and operations.
Thirdly, my business is organizing the farmers into groups of farmers, to produce and feed into the company's product line and cottage rural factories. On annual basis, Ghana is importing large quantity of food such as fruits and vegetables to beef up domestic supplies, as food has become a national security situation for many countries for example the Arab Spring of North and Middle East was on high cost of food in the region, and also food situation is backing dire as the agricultural industry has average player of 65 years which means the youths and women are not interested in farming activities in Ghana.
Comments