Voices from the field: Maame Ablore, Ghana
Despite having been farming for a “lifetime,” Maame Ablore is not against trying new things.
When she heard the voice of another female farmer on FRI’s AgroTech program on Adars FM, she started paying close attention. The woman was talking about using improved seeds on her farm.
“What she was saying motivated me,” said Maame. Soon after, she purchased a sack of the improved seeds.
Maame lives in Kobeeda Number 1, a remote community near Kintampo in the Brong Ahafo Region of Ghana.
While Maame’s farm is not very big — she planted half an acre of maize this year, and only a portion of that with the improved seeds — she said that the results she has already seen from the improved seeds have encouraged her.
“I was planning this to be a demonstration just to see,” she says. “But, as I have seen it is very good, next season I will plant all of my farm with the improved seeds.”
The radio program that Maame listens to is made possible through USAID’s New Alliance ICT Extension Challenge Fund. This project focuses on using a scalable, integrated suite of ICT-based services to cost-effectively drive behaviour change and help Ghanaian farmers increase their yields of six target crops (maize, rice, soybean, cassava, yam, and cowpeas), thereby improving food security.
