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In Ghana's North East Region, most farming households live by a single rule: one rainy season, one harvest, and whatever that harvest yields has to carry a family for twelve months. Women carry the heaviest share of making that arithmetic work. They are the ones who plan the meals, stretch the grain stores, and find whatever income they can once the field work is done for the year, often through petty trade, shea picking, or small off-season businesses built on nothing more than savings and nerve. When the rains fail, or the harvest runs short, or a shock hits between one season and the next, there is little cushion and, in many communities, no bank within reach to borrow from.
Layered on top of that is a second, quieter problem: knowledge. Sustainable, climate-smart farming practices, the kind that protect soil, reduce reliance on harmful agrochemicals, and make a single season stretch further, have not always reached the households that need them most. The result is a familiar cycle: uncertain harvests, thin savings, and limited room to plan for anything beyond the next rains.
Why Cooperatives Are theLever
A strong cooperative does several things a single household cannot. It pools savings into a Village Savings and Loans Association (VSLA) that functions as a bank where none exists. It negotiates shared infrastructure, like irrigation, that no individual farmer could finance alone. It becomes the channel through which climate-smart agroecology trainings reach an entire community rather than a handful of early adopters. And critically, it puts the decisions about what is built, who benefits, and what happens next in the hands of the farmers themselves. Acting Now (financed by @MinBuZa IGG) works by strengthening that structure so that climate resilience becomes farmer-led, locally owned, and financially durable, not something that depends on a project's presence to continue.
Three years into implementation and as the project nears its completion, a week of learning and reflecting, in collaboration with the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was organised that focused on understanding the effectiveness, sustainability, and impact of Agriterra's approach towards cooperative development and its contribution to Food and Nutrition Security on the ground.
A Workshop Before the Walk
The week commenced with a full-day hybrid Sensemaking and Validation Workshop in Accra, facilitated by MDF (independent evaluators). It brought together over 20 participants from Agriterra, DGIS and MDF. The purpose was deliberate: to synthesise the findings from across all the countries the project operates in, and to highlight what worked well and what can work better.
The workshop set the terms for what came next: a field visit to the Northeast Region, where the cooperatives themselves, not the evaluation report, would have the final word.
Into the Field
The visit began in Naasie with a courtesy call on the chief, a reminder that development work here moves through the same channels of respect that have always governed community life. With that approval given, the team moved on to meet the Tisungtaaba women's Shea collection cooperative.
The conversation with Tisungtaaba was insightful & candid. The women spoke openly about what had changed for them over three years of working with Acting Now, and just as openly about what still falls short. For example, the largest change was how before the project they would be idle outside the main shea season, but through the diversification to soy beans they can be productive for longer. They were excited about the opportunity of further diversification to crops such as groundnuts and maize. Furthermore, they shared with great enthusiasm their vision of creating a credit union through the formalization of their cooperative-driven VSLA. It set the tone for the rest of the day: a visit built for listening, not for showcasing.
The delegation then proceeded to Saligu to meet with members of the Maugsungsim Shea Cooperative & Bobgu Nyeya Shea Cooperative, where a 1-2 acre demoplot, featuring crop irrigation facilities was co-financed by the cooperatives through the programme. This demoplot is a critical training ground for climate-smartagriculture, with seeds, knowledge and inputs delivered with technical partner East West Seed. It is one of the clearest, most physical demonstrations of the project's model: pairing shared infrastructure with skills, so that a well doesn't just carry water but carries a change in how an entire cooperative farms.
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What the Cooperatives Had to Say
In meeting the cooperatives, representatives of the Tisungtaaba, Mangsungsim and Bobgu Nyeya Shea Cooperatives put names and faces to the evaluation's findings. Members described, in their own words, three years of gradual but real change, and the obstacles that still stand between them and the futures they are working toward.
“Through the VSLA, I am able to access funds to make sure there is food on the table for my family, and to support my children's education needs.”
- Sharatu Abubakari, Lead Farmer, Tisungtaaba Cooperative
“Agroecology training conducted by the Agriterra team on pesticides has improved my farming activity and brought an increase in my harvest last year.”
- Hamza Jamila
“In our community, there is currently no bank close by, and the VSLA has given us access to finance, since there is no bank that will help with accessing loans.”
- Cooperative member
“The use of the organic liquid fertiliser, introduced through agroecology training, has really helped improve the growth of my crops.”
- Hamza Jamila
“Through the Acting Now project, I am now able to get access to finance through the VSLA to start a small business during the off-season, selling local doughnuts, popularly known in Ghana as ‘boflot’, when the season is over. This helps me to manage my home as we wait for the next season.”
- Amina Seidu
The gains cluster around two things: money in hand when it is needed, and knowledge that changes what grows in the ground. The VSLAs that Acting Now helped establish have become, in the absence of a nearby bank, the only reliable source of credit these communities have. And the agroecology training delivered with East West Seed, from safer pesticide use to organic liquid fertiliser, has moved directly from the training session into higher yields.
But members were just as clear about where the project's reach still falls short of the need.
“We need support for block farming, introduced through the Acting Now project. This would be far more beneficial to us if each member of the group could have their own block farm with irrigation, so we can all diversify into vegetable production in the dry season. Right now we are put in groups, sharing one irrigation facility across the whole cooperative that has about nine hundred members.”
- Mamunatu Abdul Karim
“Tractor services are a big challenge for us when the farming season starts. Men are usually given preference for hiring, so as women we have to wait for them to finish before we can start our own farming activities.”
- Cooperative member
“There is always so much pressure on the box during the off-season, as many of us want to borrow, and there is not always enough money to support all of us.”
- Cooperative member
To conclude the visit, the two cooperatives brought the delegation to the Farmer Input Services Center in Janga, which supplies members with certified seeds, fertilisers and other (organic) agricultural inputs. The visit to the service center visualized a telling piece of the puzzle: the training members described in the quotes above only translates into higher yields if the right inputs are actually within reach, and the centre is what closes that last gap between what farmers know and what they can put in the ground.
What these cooperatives described is not a request for charity. It is a working model, tested over three years, that is already turning one uncertain season into something closer to a year-round livelihood. The clearest opportunities for partners now sit in four places: irrigation reaching individual block farms rather than one shared site, fair and accessible mechanisation, capital to deepen the VSLA model, and climate-smart input supply chains that meet the demand training has already created.
Agriterra's role in each is unchanged: not an implementer standing between funders and farmers, but the facilitator that strengthens and walks with cooperatives to hold, direct and sustain that investment themselves. The cooperatives of Walewale have already shown what they can do with the tools Acting Now has put in their hands. The next chapter is an open invitation to partners across agriculture, finance and infrastructure to build on a model farmers are already proving out.
Sowing today. Thriving tomorrow.
