The Ghanaian government has introduced a new electronic system that will help them monitor the fertilizer subsidy programme and farming inputs given to farmers.
This is an initiative spearheaded by Ghana’s Ministry of Food and Agriculture.
Every farmer who wants to benefit from the subsidy must be biometrically registered with their fingerprints and other details recorded into the system.
Before a farmer purchase fertilizer or any other item at the retail shop, his or her fingerprint would be taken and matched with the code on the bag of the fertilizer.
The code identifies the region, district, fertilizer type, source, distributor and details of the retailer. The code will help track all fertilizer bags and inputs from suppliers all the way to end user. This new system is expected to eliminate fertilizer smuggling in the country.
This will also ensure that farmers who have registered biometrically benefit from the fertilizer subsidy programme by the government.
To implement this successfully, the Ministry of Food and Agriculture is deploying about 2600 agents to all fertilizer retail shops in the country to register farmers biometrically.
So far over 500,000 farmers have been registered throughout the country.
This implies that about that 500,000 farmers in Ghana are now using the mobile input acquisition platform which is to help farmers reduce stress, acquire relevant information on good agriculture practices, weather, quality input, markets tendency, among others.
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