Africa-Press – Ghana. Stakeholders, including cassava farmers and agricultural extension agents, have held a two-day workshop to validate translated ‘AKILIMO’ (cassava planting) materials, from English into Ewe and Twi languages.
The ‘AKILIMO’ innovation concept was developed by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), purposely for educating farmers on how to use smart farming practices in cassava production to enhance yields.
Printable guides, worksheets and postcards, which summarizes the overview of production have been translated into these local languages with each containing fertilizer use recommendation, best planting practices and weed management, schedule planting and high start as well as intercropping cassava with maize.
The event was attended by selected cassava farmers and extension officers drawn from Ashanti, Volta, Oti, Bono, Bono-East, Central, and Savannah Regions.
Dr Thompson Ogunsanmi, Scaling Specialist, and Akilimo Coordinator for Ghana, Nigeria and Tanzania at the opening of the validation workshop at Adako-Jachie near Ejisu, in the Ashanti Region, explained that, agricultural extension agents were used to translate AKILIMO materials and realized the purpose of co-creating it with some of the end-users (farmers) for beneficiaries to contribute in fine tuning the translated materials.
He said the translation was necessitated by the ongoing participatory dissemination on the field where farmers’ feedback was an urgent need for better interpretation of these farming manuals, which were in English into other languages for comprehension.
According to him, the next of these translated materials would be presented in videos for farmers.
Dr Ogunsanmi mentioned that farmers’ proposal had been that Akilimo concepts be integrated into production of other crops including rice and maize.
MadamYaa Pokuaa, Principal Agricultural Officer, Ashanti Regional Department of Agriculture, indicated that the main aim of the validation was to assess whether the translated materials were farmer friendly.
She believed that when these translated materials were accessible to the farmers, it would impact and promote best farm technologies and practices of AKILIMO.
Mr Michael Amu, Agricultural Extension Officer at the Department of Agriculture in the Mampong Municipality, said AKILIMO, seeking to address some of the challenges in cassava production would help, citing the low educational background of some farmers and also ease the workload on the extension officer.
“An officer will have to read extensively before visiting the farms, if these concepts are translated into languages that can be best understood by the farmers, the workload will reduce drastically – with a little explanation the farmer will be good to go”, he stressed.
Ms Fredericka Selasie, a cassava farmer from Dzodze, observed that looking at how the procedures have been interpreted, it would help her to grow her crops better than using techniques she was unsure of and also increase the yields.
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