Northern Ghana context

Ghana has made tremendous progress in poverty reduction over the past 20 years, with the incidence of poverty declining from 56.5% in 1992 to 23.4% in 2016 (Cooke et al., 2016). However, stark inequities exist between Southern, Middle, and Northern Ghana belts. For historical and structural reasons, poverty rates (2016) in rural Northern Ghana (68%) are 2.8 times higher than the rural national average (24%). Because of this striking imbalance, many development efforts in Ghana have focused on the Northern Belt, where the 4.75-year (March 2022 – Dec 2026) project Generating Revenues and Opportunities for Women to Improve Nutrition in Ghana (GROWING) has been operating. This chapter provides an overview of the agroecological and socioeconomic context of the Northern Belt of Ghana (NBG), providing the rationale for the selection of the three regions for intervention. Then statistics from the baseline survey (Herforth et al., 2023) of the GROWING project are presented, characterizing the status of the individual women, men and children prior to receiving the gender-transformative, integrated approach that the GROWING project is undertaking, as described in Chapter 2.