| Sumario: | This report presents a qualitative impact assessment of the Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA) project in Ghana, focusing on how the program strengthened meso-level institutions (“next users”) and expanded the delivery and uptake of Climate Information Services (CIS) and Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) innovations. Ghana’s agriculture sector, dominated by rainfed smallholder systems faces deep vulnerabilities arising from erratic rainfall, prolonged dry spells, rising temperatures, and systemic barriers such as weak extension systems, fragmented climate governance, inadequate data-sharing mechanisms, and socio-economic constraints that disproportionately affect women and low-literacy farmers. AICCRA Ghana was designed to address these structural bottlenecks by enhancing institutional capacity, establishing coordinated pathways for scaling CIS/CSA, and aligning interventions with national climate policy frameworks.
The assessment draws on Key Informant Interviews (KIIs), Focus Group Discussions (FGDs), project documentation, and relevant literature. Findings show that AICCRA significantly strengthened inter-institutional collaboration through district and community CSA hubs, regular content validation routines, and co-production processes that ensured advisory consistency across GMet, CSIR-CRI, MoFA/PPRSD, digital providers, and media partners. The project enhanced technical and communication skills among extension agents, researchers, and radio broadcasters, while investing in digital platforms including IVR/SMS/USSD systems and the AgData Hub to improve real-time dissemination and analytics-driven decision-making.
AICCRA’s blended scaling model, combining radio, interactive phone-ins, IVR in local languages, community information centres, demonstration plots, and lead-farmer networks, substantially improved farmers’ access to timely, contextualized CIS/CSA advisories. Farmers reported stronger trust in advisories, better understanding of forecast implications, and increased early adoption of CSA practices such as timely planting, fertilizer scheduling, and integrated pest management. The project also fostered gender-responsive delivery, particularly through women-focused value chains such as groundnuts and cowpea.
Despite these positive outcomes, key sustainability challenges remain. Radio airtime, IVR services, and the AgData Hub rely heavily on donor financing; data-sharing tensions persist especially around GMet’s cost-recovery model; and limited extension logistics, weak institutional embedding, and persistent input and finance constraints risk limiting long-term impact. Overall, AICCRA Ghana demonstrates that coordinated, multi-actor systems, when paired with localized, inclusive dissemination pathways can significantly strengthen climate resilience, but sustained institutional commitments and financing mechanisms are required to ensure continuity and scale.
|
|---|