Young farmers, especially tomato farmers in Kpaankole have lamented over the excessive post-harvest losses due to the deplorable road network.
According to Maaniche Dary, a young tomato farmer, all his tomatoes are spoilt due to the difficulty in getting the tomatoes to the Wa market.
“All my tomatoes are rotten both on the farm and here at home, we have managed to send some to the market today but in most cases, they arrive late and have to be sold at cheaper prices to prevent further losses” he lamented.
Dary further indicated that, if the road had to be good, they could always load full trucks of tomatoes every week.
Moses Jor, a farmer also shared the same worry that amidst the low pricing of the tomatoes due to lack of appropriate storage facilities for them, they sometimes lose their investment trying to navigate through their deplorable roads for the market.
Jor added that, as youth who have no formal education in the community, their only source of livelihood is farming. He appealed to the government to fix the road and extend the one village one dam policy to the community to enable the youth to farm all year round.
Kpankole is a farming community in the Wa Municipality in the Upper West Region of Ghana. The community has a population of about 1000 with only four young people who had finished the second cycle institution.
