Agrihouse Foundation, an agric non-governmental organisation has launched a project to encourage people to create backyard garden and produce their own food.
Dubbed 1 Household, 1 Garden, the initiative is meant to help people to improve their family income and boost food sufficiency in the country.
Already, over 600 households have registered to the initiative within one week of the introduction of the project to the public.
In press statement issued in Accra on Monday, Agrihouse Foundation and signed by the Executive Director, Ms Aberta Nana Akyaa Akosa intimated that the phase 1 of the project had just been closed in order to allow for proper attention, impact and satisfactory service to each subscribed household.
It said the second phase would commence as soon as phase one household subscribers had been effectively taken care of.
The statement said the project intended to further scale up government’s on-going efforts to support families and communities to be more self-reliant.
It said another objective of the project was to provide households a simple and easily accessible source of augmenting their daily food need as a sustainable lifestyle, especially as the importance of such a living was underscored by the costly restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The project, the statements said also was to empower women and create employment for the youth engaged in agriculture, adding that project would engage 20 dynamic and hardworking women agronomists and Agric Business students from the agric colleges and universities across the country.
“By implication, the project will be creating jobs for these youth groups, and also other skilled workers like wood-work specialists, masons, landscapers, ornamentalists (decorators), and engineering students,” the statement said.
“So, this initiative comes as our proactive reaction to the spate of food scarcity and hunger we witnessed during the onset of the recent lockdown the nation went through. Indeed, the 1 Household, 1 Garden initiative is our long-term complement to government’s ongoing efforts to further enrich the lives of households. It will not only make the average Ghanaian household self-reliant, in the area of food availability, but also add extra earnings to their coffers as they also imbibe the habit of eating garden fresh foods, knowing what you are eating,” it said.
The statement commended Agro Volta, Rejuvenate, Farmhub and Apex Organics for sponsoring the programme and appealed to the government of Ghana, private and international organisations to support the initiative.
BY TIMES REPORTER
