- An NGO in the semiarid north of Ghana is helping farming communities cope with a range of challenges through initiatives that center social and human rights and build on Indigenous knowledge.
- The Regional Advisory Information and Network Systems (RAINS) promotes regenerative agricultural practices to local farmers, including intercropping, the planting of cover crops, and the use of traditional seeds and compost and manure.
- It also engages typically marginalized groups such as women and youth in community land-use planning, and tackles gender inequality by improving women’s access to savings schemes and microcredit.
- Those working with the NGO say its efforts have had a material impact on improving food security and reducing incidents of fires, and express hope for its sustained support.
In northern Ghana, communities are facing food insecurity and declining livelihoods due to erratic weather, degraded soils and loss of forests. Among those working on ways to unpick this complicated knot of challenges in the Northern Savannah Zone is an NGO called the Regional Advisory Information and Network Systems, or RAINS.
The NSZ stretches 97,000 square kilometers (37,500 square miles) across northern Ghana, where people have long grown maize, millet, yam, groundnuts and soybeans in a landscape dominated by shea nut, baobab and acacia trees. Home to more than 5 million people today, the ecological balance of this semiarid ecosystem is in danger: forest cover here declined by 77% between 2001 and 2015, according to the United Nations Development Programme.
“Evidence abounds in Ghana that temperatures in all the ecological zones including the Northern Region are rising, whereas rainfall levels and patterns have been generally reducing and increasingly becoming erratic,” Hardi Tijani, executive director of RAINS, told Mongabay via email. “Soil degradation and erosion caused by alternating floods and droughts are leading to creeping desertification.”
He said these changes have affected residents’ harvests, prompting many to turn to felling trees for timber and charcoal to earn additional income, further aggravating damage to the landscape.
To counter the threats and break this cycle, RAINS is explaining and supporting regenerative agricultural practices to farmers across the region, including intercropping, the planting of cover crops, and the use of traditional seeds and compost and manure in place of synthetic fertilizers.
Tijani said RAINS’s programs are based on Indigenous knowledge and agricultural practices that farmers in the communities around the regional capital, Tamale, where the organization is based, are already familiar with.
“We believe strongly that these are nature-based solutions that contribute to the mitigation and adaptation of communities’ efforts,” he said.
RAINS treats social and human rights as key elements of its program. Its staff help local and traditional authorities develop community land-use plans, paying particular attention to involving people with disabilities, women, youth, children and members of minority ethnic groups in a participatory process that brings community members together to identify and portion off collectively held lands for protection.
Once drawn up, these land-use plans are enforced by local committees with representatives including often-disadvantaged groups like women and youth, with the backing of the traditional authorities.
Tijani said this planning process unfolds with national development policies and priorities in mind.
“Through community dialogues, we get to understand what is important for them and work to connect them to the resources they need to address their landscape-related challenges. In addition, we collaborate with relevant state and non-state actors to collectively deliver on our mandate. This is because we think more about sustaining our results beyond donor support and funding,” he said.
RAINS currently has a two-year partnership with the Global Landscape Forum, a platform set up to support landscape-level protection of biodiversity, food security and sustainable natural resource use. Funding from the partnership supports initiatives ranging from tree planting to training for farmers, and more.
Tijani said widespread poverty hinders the capacity of women in particular to adapt to their changing environment.
“The logging of economic[ally valuable] trees such as shea trees as a result of climate change means women are losing significantly,” he said. Shea trees are an ecological and economic cornerstone of this region, producing nuts that women process into a highly prized butter, and kernels that can be burned as fuel.
“Climate change is even reducing further opportunities of women to own land for farming activities, with an increasing demand of male farmers to move their farms into farmlands they deem more fertile to reduce the impact of short rains on their crops,” Tijani said.
RAINS is helping women set up savings schemes and access to microcredit, aimed at addressing gender inequality by improving women’s access to productive resources.
Tijani noted that poverty forces the families of many children in the Northern Savannah Zone to put their children to work, denying them an education and exposing them to risks.
“RAINS has therefore designed strong safeguarding and children-centered interventions to improve the quality of life of children in farming communities through deepening access to quality education, ensuring that children become aware of their rights and responsibilities,” he told Mongabay over email. The NGO has brought social workers, police and community structures together to set up mechanisms for reporting abuse and exploitation.
Sumani Ibrahim is an agricultural extension worker in Savelugu municipality, one of the areas where RAINS works. He said the NGO’s efforts have had a material impact on food security, singling out weather information provided by RAINS, which has helped farmers to plan their farming activities better.
He also highlighted the group’s work educating the public about the dangers of bush burning and deforestation through radio programs and direct engagement with communities, telling Mongabay there are fewer fires now than when these programs started.
Ibrahim said he’s worried that the short duration of the project would reduce its effectiveness.
“The project has helped farmers in the Savelugu area and it is my prayer that the GLFx and other partners will continue to support RAINS as the adoption rate of the project activities would be greater if the life span of the project can be extended,” he said.
Tijani said he’s hopeful that with more support and partnerships, RAINS would be able to broaden its scope of programming. “In the next ten years, we want to direct our interventions more strongly in the areas of youth entrepreneurship and employability, agribusiness, youth in conservation, restoration, and greening, and gender equality and equity programming.”
Fairness and sustainability: acting to restore African landscapes
The network RAINS belongs to, GLFx, is a collection of independent, community-oriented initiatives working to transform their landscapes and advocating for stronger policy. The network, a project of the Global Landscapes Forum, is aimed at strengthening local actors by connecting them with knowledge, tools and connections that can enable them to achieve sustainable results.
Read more about the work other members of GLFx are doing: In Cameroon, forest and water source restoration offers sustainable solutions and Sierra Leone group helps farmers adapt to changing climate, protect forest.
In Madagascar, Taniala Regenerative Camp aims to heal deforestation scars
Banner image: Women sorting shea nuts, Kassena Nankana District, Ghana. Image by Axel Fassio/CIFOR via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
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