Voices from the field: Ruth Yeaboah, Ghana
“The bigger the land the higher the yield,” was what Ruth Yeaboah believed — at least until she started listening to the Agrotech program on Astor FM.
It made sense, until the radio taught her a different way of looking at it: “The effective use of land is the most important. No matter the size, if you maintain it and apply good practices you will get higher yield,” she says.
This is especially important for Ruth. As a widow, she has a hard time supporting herself. Women in the area struggle to gain access to land and without a man to back her up financially, Ruth has less resources to maintain an income.
Next season, she says, she plans on planting in rows and applying fertilizer properly in order to improve the yields on her small farm in Aworopata, in the Brong Ahafo Region of Ghana.
“I plead with the other farmers to always have time to listen to the radio because that will help our farming activities,” she says.
The radio program that Ruth 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.
