Identification and acceleration of farmer innovativeness in Upper East Ghana

Abstract

The generation of innovations has traditionally been attributed to research organizations and the farmer’s own potential for the development of innovative solutions has largely been neglected. In this chapter, we explore the innovativeness of farmers in Upper East Ghana. To this end, we employ farmer innovation contests for the identification of local innovations. Awards such as motorcycles function as an incentive for farmers to share innovations and develop new practices. The impact of Farmer Field Fora is evaluated by matching non-participants to participants using propensity scores of observable characteristics. The results indicate that farmers do actively generate and test innovative practices to address prevalent problems. Moreover, this innovative behavior can be further stimulated by Farmer Field Fora, which were tested to significantly and positively affect innovation generation.