The initiative “Nutrition-sensitive agriculture and food systems for Ghanaian SMEs: leveraging small and medium enterprises to improve nutrition” is an initiative organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and funded by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan (MAFF). The initiative involved a needs assessment to determine how small and medium enterprises (SMEs) can be encouraged and supported to deliver nutritious food.
As part of this assessment process, FAO and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) held a stakeholder workshop on 14 August 2018 at the FAO Ghana office, to discuss the key needs the initiative could fill. Training SMEs on how to improve the nutritiousness of food and raising awareness as to the value of nutrition among low-income consumers were identified as especially critical for SME success in improving nutrition. These two lines of action become the focus of the stakeholder mapping workshop that was organized on 15 August to examine the enabling environment for SMEs to improve nutrition.
The key objective of this second workshop was to identify key opportunities for helping SMEs deliver nutritious food. More specifically, participants at the workshop examined the actors, activities and investments that could bolster SMEs’ capacity to improve the nutritiousness of food and raise consumer awareness. The workshop’s participants included SMEs active in food and agriculture, as well as key representatives from the Ghanaian government and partner development organizations (see the annex to this report for a list of participants). The net-map method was used to achieve the workshop’s objectives.
This method is described in detail below. A review of the current literature on leveraging SMEs for nutrition, as well as a rapid needs assessment for SMEs working on nutritious foods were undertaken to complement the results of the workshop. This report presents and analyses the results of the three complementary activities.
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