The Zasilari Ecological Farms Project (ZEFP) was established in 1991 to help rural dwellers in the West Mamprusi District in the Northern Region to alleviate poverty by adopting effective farm practices to boost agricultural production.

Realising the importance of the environment to poverty alleviation, the founder of ZEFP, Mr David Agongo, also set out to use the project to engender sound environmental practices among the rural people.

At that time, the environment was being depleted at an alarming rate through negative practices like bush burning, destruction of water bodies and the indiscriminate felling of trees.

Though initiated in 1991, ZEFP gained more prominence in 2003 when it received funds from a Dutch Foundation, the Ghana Organic Agricul¬tural Project (GOAP), to expand its operations.

It also received support from people in acad-emia like the Pro-Vice Chancellor of the Univer¬sity for Development Studies (UDS), and Prof. David Miller, who later became the board chair¬man of ZEFP.

With support from GOAP and the board, ZEFP introduced a five-year project, which sought to improve agricultural yield in its 22 operational communities by introducing peasant farmers to effective soil fertility management and water conservation practices.

The project was also aimed at making credit facilities available to women to enable them to undertake income-generating activities.
The successful implementation of the project has improved the 
livelihoods of poor farm house-holds in the beneficiary communities.

It has first and foremost popularised the use of some effective farm technologies among farm¬ers in its intervention communities, as well as those in the neighbouring communities.

A baseline survey conducted in 2003, prior to the commencement of the programme, revealed that most peasant farmers in the rural communi¬ties were practising bush-burning and over-applying inorganic fertilisers.

The farmers could not also control pests effectively and were planting in very disorderly manner.

All these practices resulted in poor crop har-vests, high post-harvest losses and, in addition, degraded the environment.

However, through the intervention of ZEFP, practices like composting, the use of green manure, crop residue management and contour ridging are now being used actively by the fann¬ers.

Indeed, the 2003 baseline survey conducted by ZEFP indicated that only 7.5 per cent of households used compost, with none of the farm-ers using green manure, while only three per cent used crop residue management.

An evaluation of the project has revealed that currently, 71 per cent of households in the inter-vention communities have adopted the use of composting, with 72 per cent green manure while 87 per cent do crop residue management.

Again, about 90 per cent of households in the intervention communities have agreed to stop bush burning, a significant 
improvement from the nine per cent that was shown by the baseline survey in 2003.

There has also been an improvement in the adoption of mulching, stone bonding, contour ridging, row planting, crop rotation, spacing and Integrated Pest Management (IPM).

Indeed, a lot of these technologies were already fairly known to the people, but were practised on a small scale until after the sensiti-sation and demonstrations undertaken by the ZEFP.

The beneficiary farmers have themselves tes-tified to the effectiveness of these technologies and are, therefore, spreading the information to farmers in other communities.

"I have been telling my colleague farmers in other areas to come and learn from us, because we are now making more harvest through the support of ZEFP," Mustapha Alhassan, a farmer from Zasilari, said.

Again, the use of these technologies has improved food security in the intervention, areas. While over 50 per cent of households in the ZEFP intervention communities harvested enough foodstuffs to last them the whole year, only about 12 per cent did so in non-intervention areaS.

Furthermore, the provision of credit facilities to women groups in the communities has enabled the women to undertake some income-generating ventures, like the processing and selling of shea nuts, shea oil, groundnut, maize and yam.

In fact, ZEFP did not only give fish to the women, but also taught them to fish by facilitating the formation of credit (susu) groups among the women, thereby enabling them to generate
income by their own means.

"For now, we have not less than GH^llO in our bank account,"
Amina Ibrahim, the leader of one of the women’s groups, said, 
explaining that " it’s not about how much we have but the 
significance of the fact that we are saving rather than borrowing".

Meanwhile, following the successes chalked up, Mr Agongo has stressed the need for more collaboration with some important 
institutions like the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA).

"If we collaborate better with them, they would support us to 
spread these technologies to peasant farmers in other communities," he said in a chat with this writer.

Daily Graphic