Is Rural Enterprise Development a key to poverty reduction in Ghana?
By Abdul Salam Sule, Ghanadot

Accra, May 5, Ghanadot - In Ghana, poverty affects rural dwellers most. This is evidenced by the low standard of living associated with them and low level of developmental projects found in rural areas.

Successive governments had designed and come out with various intervention programs with the aim of empowering the rural poor but very little had been achieved. And reason for lack of success is because most of the intervention regimes lack policy vision or become stagnated resulting in the target beneficiaries from the rural sector becoming disappointed.

A case in point was the Ministry of Trade and Industry's rural development project which was aimed at providing financial assistance to the Ghanaian farmers. Cocoa farmers, citrus producers and oil palm farmers embraced the projects but the outcome was near to nil.

The farmers were not getting the money on time to augment their efforts to produce more and the project has seized to exist.

Mr Alexander Tetteh, a rural development expert, has in an interview called on the government and its developmental partners to consider rural enterprise development key to reducing poverty in Ghana.

According to him, the rural community could not develop without empowering the people in the community economically. He said, rural enterprise development has become an activity that Ghana could not ignore especially when it is planning to become a middle income state by the year 2020.

He explained that, rural enterprise development has a focus on agrarian business and trading which has the potential of rocketing the income of the peasant rural dwellers and this would give them an appreciable level of income which would lift them above the poverty line.

Some of the rural enterprise development programmes Mr Alexander noted include soap, powder and pomade making, batik, tie and dye, bakery, snail rearing, entrepreneurial training business and micro enterprise development among others.

"Rural enterprise development when adopted and well implemented can become a tool that can catapult any state rural economy into one that will reduce poverty and improve the live of the people', he added.

Mr Alexander further said, in order to make rural enterprise development meaningful, business counselling should be given to the beneficiaries after the training with a capital to start their business.

He has therefore called on the National Board of Small Scale Industries under the Ministry of Trade and Industry to adopt rural enterprise development in its quest to provide lasting solutions to poverty that has bedevilled most rural dwellers in the counntry.

He has also urged the mining industries operating in the various rural communities to adopt similar method as part of its coporate social responsibilities and it would promote development in the form of infrastructure and human resource.

"It is also hoped that other coporate bodies like the banks will be able to include in their coporate budgets interventions that focus on rural enterprise development to help the government of Ghana meet the vision of the millenium development goals of the United Nations for reducing poverty in the country. Poverty per say may not be fully killed but it can be reduced to the barest minimum through rural enterprise development", he noted.

Ghanadot