Information, Market Access and Risk: Addressing Constraints to Agricultural Transformation in Northern Ghana

About this event

Farmers face a wide array of constraints that hinder their adoption of the intensified agriculture that might increase their productivity, agricultural income, and living standards. These constraints include imperfect financial markets, uncertain land tenure rights, asymmetric information in input quality, imperfectly competitive output markets, thin and unreliable labor markets and many others. We examine a set of three constraints that previous research has indicated may be of importance in the study area of northern Ghana. The first is incomplete insurance, specifically against risk generated by community-level variation in rainfall. The second is imperfect agricultural input markets, with unreliable availability and quality of inputs. The third is imperfect information on the profitability and appropriate use of the inputs for more intensive cultivation.