The Gare Primary School in the Talensi District Upper East Region is one of the many schools built by the government of Ghana in its efforts to improve upon the educational sector of the country. Built only two years ago, the school’s building is of modern day standards. However, there is no furniture at the school and pupils lie prostrate on the floors of the classrooms to write.

Looking at the school from outside, everything appears excellent. The school is beautifully painted in a yellow and brown combination, its surroundings, very neat with carefully planted flowers in the compound.

The school is even connected to electricity. In fact, two of the classrooms which are being used as the kindergarten section of the school have fans in them.

However, the problems that the school faces overwhelm both its teachers and pupils. One major challenge confronting the Gare Primary School is lack of furniture. There is no single table or chair for the children to sit on in class. Therefore when teaching is on-going the children sit on the cold cement bare floors to listen to their teachers and then lie flat on their stomachs when it is time for them to write down notes.

Headmaster of the school, Albert Boagre says the situation is hampering effective teaching and learning. He said the children learn in discomfort and it does not motivate teachers to give off their best as a result of the situation.

The negative impact of the absence of furniture at Gare primary school could have been curtailed or perhaps subdued if there were enough teachers to teach the pupils. But for now, having enough teachers can only remain a day dream for the headmaster, who has been forced to double as a classroom teacher because the school is severely understaffed. He said the school currently has two trained teachers, one pupil teacher and four volunteer teachers who are Senior High School graduates.

Little Lucy Zangmi, a JHS 1 pupil of the school has been taking advantage of this situation to practice her dream of becoming a teacher in future. At the time of my visit, she had a free period in her class and used the opportunity to force a whole primary two class who were playing outside as a result of the absence of their teacher, back to the classroom to take them through an English language lesson.

It is not surprising therefore that even the most brilliant pupils at Gare primary school have difficulties in speaking the English language. Four Class 4 pupils struggled to speak English while trying to tell me how they feel about the situation in their school and I could not make out the sense in what they told me, no matter how simply I posed the questions.

Government may have been able to provide a beautiful building for the Gare Primary School but without furniture, learning in this school has almost become impossible. As a matter of fact, a lot of children have moved to far away schools, causing a drastic decline in the population of this school and others have completely dropped out of school.

It is only a matter of time before the determined children who have continued to come to Gare Primary School to get education also dropped out of school. Therefore government must act decisively in responding to the needs of this school.

Credit: Albert Sore

Year in, year out, crates of tomatoes get rotten on farms in the Upper East Region. One reason known to account for this problem is that buyers of tomatoes in Ghana prefer tomatoes from neighbouring Burkina Faso because they have a better quality.

In times past, the financial implications of this problem were so severe that they drove some farmers into taking their own lives because they had recorded severe post-harvest loses and did not know how to pay back loans they had taken to cultivate the tomatoes.

The farmers also consistently battle with problems of bumper harvests coupled with the lack of a ready market caused by the indefinite closure of the Tomato factory in Pwalugu. In the end, a lot of their tomatoes get rotten on their farms and in the local markets and many of them lose a lot of money.

Governments over the years seem to lack the political will to find a solution to this problem. They could have at least, put the tomato factory back on track as a measure to reduce the plight of the farmers but instead, they make all kinds of promises which they never fulfil. As a matter of fact, promises by politicians to tomato farmers in the Upper East Region have almost become annual rituals.

Market women from mainly Accra and Kumasi are key determinants of the fate of tomato farmers in the Upper East Region. These women are traders who buy tomatoes in very large quantities and in turn, sell in parts of the country where there is a high demand for the commodity. If these women bought from the farmers in the Upper East Region, then they would have helped solve a part of the problem of the farmers. However, they do not buy tomatoes from the Upper East Region. They rather spend extra money, travelling into neighbouring Burkina Faso to buy tomatoes from there.  Only farmers who allow the market women to determine the prices of their tomatoes manage to catch the eyes of these women.

The market women do this for only one reason: tomatoes from Burkina Faso have the quality of lasting longer before they perish. Therefore if the women were unable to immediately sell what they bought, they are sure the tomatoes will not rot within a short period of time. Tomatoes from the Upper East Region lack this quality and that is why the market women do not buy it.

So why do Ghana tomatoes lack this one important quality that those from Burkina Faso have? This is the question I posed to some of the farmers. Two of them: Donald Samani and Eddy Ayine attributed the problem to differences in farming practices in the two countries. They said while Burkinabe farmers use compost manure, the Ghanaian farmers use fertilizers which make their tomatoes ripe very quickly and can rot within a few days after ripping.

Donald Samani, who is also the President of the Upper East Regional Vegetable Farmers Association further explained that they often buy seedlings from Accra, most which were genetically modified for cultivation and admitted that they are still battling with getting seedlings with the quality they are looking for.

Plant Breeding can improve the quality, diversity and performance of just about any crop and help develop plants better suitable to human needs: Through scientific methods, a certain quality in one variety of a crop can be put into another variety of the same kind of crop. This is something I learned at a media fellowship in Accra in March 2013 on the Biosciences for Farming in Africa (B4FA) programme, specifically designed to encourage informed discussion about the potential application of biosciences and genetics for farming in Africa.

At the workshop, Maxwell Darko of the Crop Research Institute, Kumasi, explained that the method is applied to different varieties of rice to for example, infuse aroma and disease resistance qualities from variety to variety. Also, Abu Dadzie, a crop research expert at the cocoa research institute of Ghana in New Tarfo explained that the method is applied to different varieties of cocoa to improve upon the resistance of varieties of cocoa that are less resistant to the Black Pod disease. Other lecturers at the workshop said that Plant Breeding is also applied to Maize and Cowpea.

After listening to all the speakers, I said to myself: “if Plant Breeding can be applied to any kind of crop, then the tomato farmers of the Upper East Region can apply it to get their tomatoes to have the same quality that the Burkinabe tomatoes have”. To be 100% sure, I asked Professor Eric Danquah of the West African Center for Crop Improvement (WACCI), University of Ghana, Legon and he admitted: “we can improve the quality of any of our crop plants including tomato through Plant breeding”.

In conclusion, if we are still looking for ways to get Ghana tomato to have the one quality of Burkina Faso tomato that market women are looking for, then Plant Breeding is one sure way.

Credit: Albert Sore | Ghana