Abstract

Irrigated agriculture offers opportunities for greater livelihoods security and poverty reduction in northern Ghana where climatic conditions do not allow for an all-year-around agricultural production. It is the knowledge gap as regards the contribution of existing irrigation facilities in the area that occasioned the case study of the Tono irrigation scheme in the Kassena-Nankana District. The investigation adopted a treatment and control experimental approach. The treatment group comprised a sample of 93 out of a total of 1328 Tono irrigation tomato farmers and a control group sample of 86 out of 614 irrigation tomato farmers operating outside the Tono irrigation scheme. The samples were selected at a confidence level of 90% allowing for 0.1% margin of error. The Tono irrigated scheme created a platform for employment and high agricultural output but made only modest gains towards poverty reduction in the district. The challenges to that that served as a check included high cost of hiring farm machinery, inadequate access to credit, poor water supply for irrigation, ineffective technical assistance, lack of entrepreneurial skills, lack of storage facilities and inadequate ready market to translate the outputs into incomes for the farmers. A more responsive institutional arrangement inclusive of all pertinent stakeholders is recommended to ensure the effective management and utilisation of the irrigation infrastructure; the efficient delivery of farm inputs to farmers; farmer-centred capacity building training for improved performance, and provision of storage facilities, the establishment of agro-industry processing linkages, market search and promotion.

Keywords: Agriculture, Irrigation, Poverty, Tono Irrigation Scheme.