Résumé
In Ghana, as in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, structural transformations are limited and the agri-food system will have to provide more and better jobs in the future. However, research projects addressing the issue of labour in farms and value chains have to be tailored to the Ghanaian system of research and development. This report presents the result of a study of the Ghanaian agricultural research and development system, focusing on the actors using labour and value chain approaches applied to the agri-food sector. It addresses the following questions: 1. Who are the actors of the Ghanaian agricultural research and development system? 2. What are their activities? 3. How connected are the actors of the system? 4. What are the perspectives for projects and partnerships for Cirad? The method, which might be used in other countries to better understand the context of Cirad's activities, was based on focus group discussions and semi directed interviews with actors of the network. Databases about actors' features, activities and connections were analysed with multivariate analyses and social network analyses. Results in Chapter 2 show there are numerous actors in the agricultural research and development system and that, they implement activities of development, research, funding, education and training, as well as advocacy. Their mandates are often in agricultural development and their activities mainly made of projects. There are slightly more activities in the Savannah regions than other parts of Ghana and the Northern Region receives higher budgets because of its high rates of poverty and food insecurity. More projects support cereals, legumes and tree crops and important staple products such as yam, cassava and livestock are poorly supported. Projects are mainly funded by bilateral donors, particularly USAID, Netherlands Embassy and Global Affairs Canada, and multilateral donors, in particular the European Union and the World Bank. Smallholder farmers are targeted by most activities while agricultural workers, processors, traders and other downstream value chain actors are less often beneficiaries of projects. Social network analyses show that donors are the most important actors of the agricultural research and development system. They all work with local research centres, in particular, the European Union. While USAID and Global Affairs Canada work also with NGOs, FAO is the most connected to public development actors. Research actors, in particular, CSIR centres, play an important role in making connections between subparts of the network. In that network, public organisations are not very influential, apart from the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) which is directly connected to bilateral and multilateral donors. Information exchanges between actors of the system are not as pronounced as budget exchanges and there are limited connections on value chain and labour issues between local research centres and policy makers.