The Vice President of World Bank in charge of Africa, Dr. Hafez Ghanem, has stated that the World Bank would provide five more greenhouse domes to Rosh Pinnah Farms in order to employ and train more aged women in the Natriku community. He said this when he paid a visit to the farm at Natriku community at Osudoku District on 27th March, 2019 as part of his three-day visit to Ghana.
Speaking to AgricToday media, Dr. Ghanem said that the World Bank as an institution whose objective is to fight poverty in Africa and is that kind of project he witness today that bank supports. He added that, the bank provides financing by providing the greenhouses and what the women have to do is to put their maximum effort with their strength to make good use of the facilities by producing food products.
According to him, the project has really helped the women since all of them are in their old age and are on pension without any pension benefits. “Rosh Pinnah Farms’ project is helping to fight poverty, hunger and gender inequality. “All the women here are between fifty-seven (57) and eighty (80), they have worked with all their lives and they do not have pension pay so through this project they are empowered and are able to improve upon their lives,” he said.
The Executive Director of Rosh Pinnah Farms, Dr. Florence Vanderpuye, recounted how she started the project in 2016. According to her, the Rosh Pinnah Farms project was her project work for her doctorate thesis and when she graduated she decided to put it into practice in order to help the aged and the youth in the Natriku community. To her, the motivation for embarking on this project was to impact the lives of the women. ‘I needed a project which would impact lives, I did not want a project which would be on paper in the shelves so I wanted to do something which would be seen on the ground that I am empowering women not by lip service’, she narrated.
Dr. Vanderpoye said that now she has twenty women that she is training and she pays each twenty dollars (20) a month. This, she said, is the beginning and is termed as a crawling stage therefore; she is looking forward to expand the project in order to pay the women more. She thanked World Bank for helping to build five more greenhouse domes to what the bank provided through West Africa Agricultural Productivity Programme (WAAPP) initiative to enable her train more aged women and the youth in the community to actualized her dream.
Speaking to some of the women who have benefited from the project, they said the project has really improved their lives. Addressing how the project has helped them, they noted that ‘since the time we joined this project it has improved our lives. We able to pay our children’s school fees and can now afford some basic needs for our homes’. They also pleaded with private individuals and corperate organizations to support or invest in the initiative to increase the number of beneficiaries in the community.
