Watering of agricultural activities and poverty reduction in Northen Ghana: A case study of the Tono Irrigation Scheme in the Kassena Nankana District

Abstract

Irrigated agriculture offers opportunities for greater livelihoods security and poverty reduction in 
northern Ghana where climatic conditions do not allow for an all-year-around agricultural production. It 
is the knowledge gap as regards the contribution of existing irrigation facilities in the area that 
occasioned the case study of the Tono irrigation scheme in the Kassena-Nankana District. The 
investigation adopted a treatment and control experimental approach. The treatment group comprised a 
sample of 93 out of a total of 1328 Tono irrigation tomato farmers and a control group sample of 86 out 
of 614 irrigation tomato farmers operating outside the Tono irrigation scheme. The samples were 
selected at a confidence level of 90% allowing for 0.1% margin of error. The Tono irrigated scheme 
created a platform for employment and high agricultural output but made only modest gains towards 
poverty reduction in the district. The challenges to that that served as a check included high cost of 
hiring farm machinery, inadequate access to credit, poor water supply for irrigation, ineffective 
technical assistance, lack of entrepreneurial skills, lack of storage facilities and inadequate ready 
market to translate the outputs into incomes for the farmers. A more responsive institutional 
arrangement inclusive of all pertinent stakeholders is recommended to ensure the effective 
management and utilisation of the irrigation infrastructure; the efficient delivery of farm inputs to 
farmers; farmer-centred capacity building training for improved performance, and provision of storage 
facilities, the establishment of agro-industry processing linkages, market search and promotion.