Godfred Seidu Jasaw

Linking Individual and Collective Agency for Enhancing Community Resilience in Northern Ghana

ABSTRACT This article aims to explore the relationship between individual adaptive actions and enhancement of community resilience to climate change as a communal objective. It proposes to pay attention to the concept of reflexivity as the primary individual capacity to link adaptive actions and community resilience. Drawing on the field research conducted in northern Ghana in 2015, this article specifically examines life histories of four small farmers and shows that they individually take adaptive actions and reflect on these actions. However, little opportunity exists for them to systematically communicate the reflections with others to learn from their experiences, nurture collective agency and enhance community resilience. The article concludes by outlining new strategies needed to facilitate the communication in particular cultural and policy contexts.

The Ghana Model for Resilience Enhancement in Semiarid Ghana: Conceptualization and Social Implementation

Many government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and academic and research institutions have over the past two decades conducted studies and implemented actions aimed at developing frameworks, models, and tools to assess the resilience to climate and ecosystem changes of vulnerable communities. However, actions and studies encompassing empirical field tests of the assessment instruments are relatively few. This chapter reports the outcomes of an empirically applied resilience assessment framework, hereafter referred to as the “Ghana Model,” which was initiated as part of the “Enhancing Resilience to Climate and Ecosystem Changes in Semi-Arid Africa: An Integrated Approach (CECAR-Africa)” project, implemented in Ghana’s semiarid ecosystem. The chapter provides a concise description of the “Ghana Model” as an integrated resilience assessment framework as underpinned by seven principles while highlighting the concrete actions and steps taken in operationalizing it. As a clinically valid approach for resilience assessment, the Ghana Model provides valuable evidence to aid decision and policymakers in Ghana in designing and implementing adaptation strategies for climate change in vulnerable communities and households. As a resilience assessment template, it can be applied in other ecosystems within other sub-Saharan African countries as well as other developing economies. The Ghana Model can enrich ongoing discourse on global sustainability as well as provide relevant output toward the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals.

Toward Enhancing Resilience to Climate and Ecosystem Changes in Semi-Arid Africa: Evidence from Northern Ghana

With societies, communities, and households continually experiencing changes in social, economic, and environmental conditions, building resilience to mitigate and adapt to shocks and stresses associated with these inherent changes has become an urgent matter. Development of a comprehensive resilience assessment framework with the active engagement of multiple relevant stakeholders can foster the adoption and promotion of plausible and practical resilience enhancement strategies among vulnerable groups. The interdisciplinary research project called ‘Enhancing Resilience to Climate and Ecosystem Changes in Semi-Arid Africa: An Integrated Approach’ (CECAR-Africa) was initiated in 2010 as part of the Science and Technology Research Partnership for Sustainable Development (SATREPS) program for international research into pressing global issues by researchers in Japan and developing countries. CECAR-Africa aimed to contribute to filling gaps in resilience assessment whilst proposing tested, practical and sustainable resilience enhancement strategies for use in socio-ecological regions with a special focus on flood and drought-prone rural communities and households in semiarid Northern Ghana.

Material Flow Analysis of Shea Butter Production Systems: Implications for Sustainability in Semi-arid Ghana

Shea (Vitellaria paradoxa) from Savannah landscapes is a popular source of vegetable oil for household and industrial consumption. The fruits are usually collected by women and processed into shea kernels and/or handcrafted shea butter for household consumption and sale in national and international markets. The volume of processed shea butter exported from Ghana has almost doubled from under 20,000 metric tons in 2009 to approximately 40,000 metric tons in 2013. The processing methods and technologies used at the microlevel are characterized by high consumption of water, fuelwood, and labor per unit output of crude shea butter. The level of input consumption and the operations performed by local processors have implications for the sustainability of the production process. Based on field interviews with experts and traders as well as on-site input inventory and measurements of consumption levels, this study analyzed the material demands and opportunities for improving production efficiency, marketing, and the livelihoods of the actors in urban and rural areas along the shea supply chain. The analysis goes beyond the shea value chain and applies material flow analysis to a discussion of simple efficiency scenarios for the most resource-consuming stages in the shea processing chain. Practical options for achieving sustainability through reduced material consumption and maintaining the supply capacity of natural capital are also discussed.