Generating Revenues and Opportunities for Women to Improve Nutrition in Ghana (GROWING) Project. Baseline Report

We are excited to express our sincere gratitude and appreciation to those who contributed in various ways to the successful completion of the baseline survey and this baseline report.We acknowledge that without their contributions, producing the baseline report would not have been possible.We express our heartfelt gratitude to the donor of the GROWING project, Global Affairs Canada (GAC) for funding the project.We appreciate the strong commitment to funding a climate resilient , agriculture-nutrition-and-marketing project to achieve the ultimate goal of ensuring financial security and empowerment of women, youth and children.We also express our deep gratitude to the lead implementing organization, the International Potato Center (CIP) for the initiation and implementation of the project starting with the baseline survey leading to this baseline report.This demonstrates the commitment to the vision of achieving food security, well-being, and gender equity for poor people.Without CIP's commitment to generating credible evidence, this work would not have been possible.CARE International, as an implementing partner for the GROWING project, has made substantial contribution through development of the survey tool, field data collection, and commenting on the draft report.Similarly, we express our deep gratitude to the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) that hosts the CIP in Ghana for facilitating the contracting and payment process of the initial survey consultants.The contractual process could not have been more effective.Moreover, we would like to acknowledge the immense contribution of the implementing partners of the GROWING project: International, Ghana Health Services (GHS) and the Department of Agriculture under the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) for their significant support and coordination throughout the baseline data collection and reporting.We also wish to thank our expert consultant, Dr. Ariel BenYishay, working with AidData at William and Mary University (USA), for providing expert guidance on statistical power calculations and randomized sampling procedures.We are also grateful to Hazel Malapit, Simone Faas, and Ara Go of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) for their technical advice on the project-level women's empowerment index in agriculture (Pro-WEAI).This support was enable through the Adaptation and Integration of Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) and Nutrition Assessment Approaches and Tools into the Context of Northern Ghana (AIWNA) project, funded by the CGIAR Gender Platform.We would like to extend our special thanks to the data collection consultants (enumerators and supervisors) who traveled to the 180 communities in six districts of the former Northern region of Ghana to diligently collect and submit the baseline data.They demonstrated hard work and commitment to delivering high-quality baseline data.In addition, we want to acknowledge the relentless efforts and dedication of our CIP project staff who supported the baseline activities, including procurement, logistics, questionnaire development, questionnaire digitization, pre-testing, field monitoring, data cleaning and analysis to synthesize the information presented in this report.In addition, we appreciate their expertise in proofreading our write-ups, revisions, and comments leading to the success of this report.Lastly, we would like to thank all the participants in the survey.We appreciate their patience in answering our questions and their hospitality in welcoming us into their homes and providing us with the comfort we required to collect the baseline data.Your participation in the baseline survey provided us with valuable information to understand the baseline conditions and outcomes of the GROWING project. Executive Summary A. IntroductionThe former Northern Region (fNR) of Ghana (currently composed of the Northern Region, Savannah region and Northeast Region) faces several challenges: poor soil fertility, erratic rainfall and a long dry season exacerbated by climate change pose major threats to the agricultural sector, which continues to support the livelihoods of many smallholder farmers.Nutrition is often inadequate, lacking important macro-and micronutrients, including vitamin A, calcium, iron, zinc, and vitamin B12 and adequate hygiene practices.These deficiencies are responsible for a high prevalence of stunting (≥20%) and anemia (≥30%) among young children (6-59 months of age) and women (15-49 years of age).Important drivers are high levels of illiteracy and early marriage among women and existing gender inequities deeply rooted in the social norms prevailing in rural areas of the fNR.The Generating Revenues & Opportunities for Women to Improve Nutrition in Ghana (GROWING) project aims to improve the nutritional and financial security of women, youth, and young children in six priority districts of the fNR: Chereponi, East Mamprusi, Gushegu, Saboba, North Gonja and West Gonja.The project aims to reach 7,650 households using an integrated climate-smart agriculturenutrition-marketing approach comprised of four components: nutrition, agriculture, gender transformation, and marketing.These components are implemented in the form of training, demonstration of technologies, distribution of planting materials, organizational interventions, gender dialogues, and institutional linkages related to financial institutions and input/output markets.Four new and nutritious crops will be promoted in the project: orange-fleshed sweetpotato (OFSP), papaya, moringa, and amaranth.These were selected to address specific micronutrient deficiencies in the diet of beneficiaries.The project will also demonstrate climate-resilient and sustainable production and post-harvest management techniques of groundnuts in the Savanna region and soybeans in Northern and Northeast regions.Furthermore, selected communities will test rearing cavies for generating incomes and for consumption to increase beneficiaries' intake of vitamin B12, iron and zinc in their diet.The GROWING project is funded by Global Affairs Canada (GAC) and is implemented over a duration of 4 years and 9 months (March 2022-December 2026).Three cycles of the fully integrated intervention package will be implemented, each cycle lasting 24 months.The project is led by the International Potato Center (CIP) and co-implemented with CARE International and in partnership with the Ghana Health Services (GHS) and the Ghana Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA). B. Objectives of the reportThe baseline report aims to present findings of the baseline survey that was administered to GROWING households.The report has four objectives: First, the results shall enhance the understanding of project staff about the community contexts in which the various project components operate.The findings will be highly relevant for effective and efficient design and targeting of the project activities and form an important basis for decision-making and management.Second, this report serves to report to GAC and interested stakeholders, providing solid evidence on the contextual setting and living conditions of project participants prior to the start of the intervention activities of GROWING.The evidence provided can help to manage implementation and in monitoring the progress made.Third, a comparison of baseline data between treatment and control groups helps to assess whether the characteristics of both groups are similar, i.e., whether the randomized assignment of households into the treatment group was successful in establishing comparable groups.This assessment will E. ImplicationsIn the following, we summarize the key implications for the GROWING project derived from the findings of this baseline report.Section 9 provides a more comprehensive presentation of the implications.The objective of the GROWING project to reduce gender inequities and to empower women is of great relevance and meets the immediate needs of women.Little membership in influential groups, work balance, respect among household members, and group membership are important contributors to women's disempowerment and should be tackled effectively.Understanding the sociocultural contextual differences between districts that inhibit or enable gender equity appears to be crucial.This should help develop appropriate gender-transformative approaches that involve various community stakeholders, in the community, particularly in the Gushegu district, which experiences by far the lowest levels of women's empowerment and gender parity.A challenge in providing appropriate training services to these rural communities is the high level of illiteracy among both women (72.3% illiterate) and men (63.9%) associated with low levels of educational attainment.The nutrition and climate-smart agriculture components are highly relevant for improving food security among GROWING households.Dependency on rainfed agriculture and lack of access to water during the dry season are major challenges faced when addressing food insecurity, which requires the inclusion of a strong post-harvest component for sweetpotato and techniques for seed conservation.The introduction of these climatic-resilient techniques considers the existing agroecological and socioeconomic challenges prevailing in the fNR.Adequate resources should be particularly allocated to Chereponi and West Gonja districts, since both represent the highest shares of moderately and severely food insecure households.Access to extension services was found to be very low.Trainings on climate-smart and sustainable cultivation practices of four nutritious crops and cavy rearing should take into account the limited exposure of farmers to public training by developing appropriate training materials and applying trust-building measures from the beginning.The GROWING project model of capacitating volunteer farmers (both men and women) as Community-Based Extension Agents (

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