Ghana is on track to become the first African nation to achieve the Millennium Development Goals on reducing poverty and hunger, Melinda Gates says.
Agriculture plays a key role in this success, the co-founder and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation adds.
The African country, according to the American philanthropist, invests nearly 10 percent of its budget in improving agriculture. An increase in cocoa production has helped to propel the nation’s exports, Gates says, adding that child malnutrition in Ghana has been almost halved since the end of the 1980s.
Gates acknowledged that there is still work to be done in bolstering Ghana’s agriculture sector. She said only half of the land suitable for agriculture is currently under cultivation, while the market for some crops is underdeveloped.
“But there is no disputing the fact that Ghana is on the right path: just two decades ago, Ghana was a country that struggled to feed its own people; now it has ambitions to become the breadbasket for West Africa,” Gates writes in a blog for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s website.