Accurate and relevant data has been identified as critical in development planning. The results of Ghana’s COVID-19 Agribusiness Tracker survey provide insights into the impact of COVID-19 on agribusinesses.

According to the findings, 16,000 agribusiness firms remained closed since 2020 due to the lockdown.  In addition, over 78,000 estimated staff were laid-off and more than 267,000 workers had their wages reduced between May 2020 and January 2021.

To facilitate policy actions on the findings, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), in partnership with the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), engaged stakeholders from both private and public sectors to discuss  the findings of the agribusiness tracker and its policy implications.

Speaking at the policy action retreat, Raphael Frerking, Programs Manager of the GIZ’s Governance for Inclusive Development (GovID) Programme, called for stronger partnerships to support agribusinesses to recover from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. He said, “let us work together to revamp the agribusiness sector by designing policies and programmes that will make them operate effectively again”.

Dr. Frederick Mugisha, UNDP Economic Advisor for Ghana and the Gambia, noted that the government can only develop better approaches to respond to agribusinesses when they understand how these firms are affected, hence, the importance of the agribusiness tracker. He added that “agribusinesses contribute significantly to the local economy development and there is the need to put policies in place to assist them to bounce back better”.

The stakeholders at the policy action retreat recommended key policies to help agribusinesses recover. These include the need to:

• create enabling environment for private sector, including financial sector players, to invest in agribusinesses
• explore avenues to incentivize enterprises to register their businesses
• encourage businesses to invest in agricultural technology and digitalize their processes and activities throughout the value-chain
• support Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) to build strategic partnerships and networks to leverage opportunities to facilitate the recovery process

The policy action retreat gathered participants from government, academia, civil societies and MSMEs.