Achieving food security amongst Ghanaian smallholder farmers: The valuable role of inclusive agribusiness.
Summary
In this thesis, the role of inclusive agricultural business on the food security of involved suppliers is explored. The thesis involves a case study of HPW Fresh & Dry Ltd., a Swiss small or medium sized enterprise (SME) in southern Ghana. A mixed-method approach was applied to obtain qualitative and quantitative data by means of a preliminary desk study, nine semi-structured interviews, 117 household surveys, five focus group discussions and participatory observation. Respondents were randomly selected from a suppliers-list. The analytical tools that are used include a one-way Anova tests for continues variables and chi-square tests for nominal and ordinal variables, performed with IBM SPSS statistics version 23. Post Hoc Scheffe tests were performed to assess statistically differences between pairs of means. Bivariate analyses were performed to study the strength of relations between various variables. The inclusiveness of the HPW Fresh & Dry Ltd. business model was analyzed using six criteria for an IBM as proposed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). It was found that the business model complies with all six criteria, the one to a greater extent than the other. Income security, knowledge transfers and scalability of the business model contribute most to food security: food is best available and accessible right after the first harvest, when payments have been effected. A value chain analysis (VCA) was applied to detect involved actors’ struggles and strategies to overcome these struggles. While food availability and accessibility issues are experienced during the dry season, food utilization i.e. diversity in dietary intake is inadequate outside of the scarcity period as well. A 24h food diary recall method was used to calculate Food Variety Scores (FVS) and Dietary Diversity Scores (DDS). FVS is low: eleven out of 45 available food items were consumed on average, with minimum and maximum of six and sixteen food items, respectively. DDS scores were high with five out of six food groups on average, with minimum and maximum of three and six food groups, respectively. These outcomes palliate the lack of dietary intake as respondents largely rely on three typical meals: fufu, banku and rice with stew. These are energy-rich dishes and consist of largely of carbohydrates (cassava, maize and rice), accompanied with very small amounts of (dried) fish and a soup or stew. Diversity in dietary intake hence is where suppliers stand to gain. The extent to which this is a task of inclusive agribusiness, is debatable.