Imagine having to walk 12kilometers daily to a farm, to produce food to feed your family and many others. This notwithstanding, the biggest challenge is having to look for money especially during the dry season, to hire a petrol or diesel-powered water pump to irrigate your crops. The unsustainability of this irrigation process in the face of climate change was forcing many smallholder farmers like Iddrisu Aboubakar, a Vegetable and Fruit Farmer in Tamalgu in the Northern Region of Ghana, to rely on rain-fed agriculture. This was making it difficult to farm all-year round because Northern Ghana has only one farming season and it is much drier than the South. Since 2001 when he started farming, due to his inability to afford the expensive fuel-powered irrigation pumps in his community, Iddrisu was farming only a quarter acre of plot and only once in a year. Life, he said, was unbearable, as he had to be living with his father with his family of ten (2 wives and 8 children) and taking care of them was challenging. Thanks to an intervention by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), in partnership with the Energy Commission of Ghana and NewEnergy, a local NGO, Iddrisu’s farming career is now a different story.
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