The Agricultural Development Bank creates jobs for people to help them come out of poverty
Dr Kofi Mensah, managing director of Agricultural Development Bank We decided to support agriculture because our country’s rural population is very significant (in terms of its size) and the great majority of people work in agriculture.
ADB has two main business lines. The first is job creation for people involved in the sector with our main objective to help them come out of poverty. The second is commercial banking.
The current government is very agriculture focused, and this has allowed us to increase our funding in the sector.
At the moment, we count 78 branches and we will be opening four news ones shortly, which will increase our presence to 82 branches in mostly rural communities.
Our next step will be to fund peasant farmers using technology-based agriculture, a programme related to the “One District One Factory” initiative.
The government is looking at creating the Cashew Development Board, which ADB will support, to encourage the development of the cashew industry, regulate farmers and guarantee selling prices, much as Ghana Cocoa Board’s role in the cocoa industry.
We are currently the main bank financing poultry production in Ghana, especially in the central and northern regions. There is a move towards the local production of poultry products.
We are placing emphasis on value chain agriculture and the poultry market is a good example of the efforts being set in place to increase local content in the products we daily consume.
I am happy to say that we recently signed an agreement with China, in regards to “one district, one factory”, and we’ll have Chinese funding coming through some local banks.
There is now a growing link between Ghana and China, with corporation at various levels, and agriculture is key.
