Small scale farmers educated on budget process
The Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana (PFAG), with support from Trust Africa, an international donor organisation, has organised a day’s training workshop for leaders of small scale farms on budget process and advocacy.
The workshop, held in Accra, on Saturday, was aimed at equipping the farmers with skills, which would enable them to take on their budget process effectively to ensure that their demands and interest were met in the annual national budgets.
In addition, it was to prepare farmer based organisations to require better accountability from governments.
Topics discussed include, what a budget was, budget process and analysis, budget tracking and monitoring, among other topics.
Mr Sylvester Bagoora, an expert on Budget Advocacy, in a presentation, said to identify a good budget, farmers needed to look for the consistency of how the budget interacts with the medium term development plan and the long term development.
He said the training would enable participants to obtain the view on budget, as a useful and accessible policy and governance document.
This, Mr Bagoora said, would stimulate the interest of participants to study, analysis and track budgetary allocations, particularly, for implementation measure in the agricultural sector.
He said there were so many indicators, that the farmers could use to input into the budget, which includes the submission of inputs, in the form of reports, documents and letters to the elected representatives in parliament.
Also the “Monitoring of projects and programmes, to provide feedback to policy makers and collate views, case studies and stories on situation of small scale farmers, to feed into policy review,” he added.
Mr Bagoora noted that issues could also be made through media discussions, public debate and other advocacy platforms.
Madam Victoria Adongo, Programme Coordinator at PFAG, said the trainees were expected to educate their members about what they have learnt.
She said this would enable them to contribute meaningfully to national and district budgetary discussions, when the need arises.
“The workshop is to develop the capacity of the farmers in the budgetary process as a policy tool for national development,” she added.
She urged the participants to take the training workshop serious, to enable them to improve on the budgetary allocation of the small scale farmers, as compared to other farmers in the agriculture sector.
Mr Benjamin Kanati, a participant, told the Ghana News Agency that the
training has given him more insight into what the budget process entails.
Source: GNA