Earning a decent living
Our village savings and loan projects reduce poverty by enabling poor families to make investments, such as in tools or livestock, which can improve lives as well as increase future income. However, lack of access to affordable loans and other financial services is not the only challenge poor people face in growing their enterprises and livelihoods.
That's why CARE also addresses other factors that can hold people back from building successful businesses, such as access to market information; use of technologies that enable people to manage their inputs and add value to their involvement in markets; a positive business environment; financial and market literacy; the ability to manage risk; and the means to overcome socio-economic traditions and power balances that exclude poor and marginalised people from participation in livelihood opportunities.
Food security and nutrition
CARE Ghana uses a holistic approach to food security by combining the areas of agriculture, economic development, climate change, gender and nutrition. This allows us to develop coordinated efforts to address the underlying causes of food insecurity.
The vast majority of the farmers we work with are subsistence farmers, who are increasingly graduating into commercial production. Our approach to food security is based on a combination of increasing productivity and promoting equity through sustainable methods by focusing on locally available and appropriate inputs, materials and tools. CARE also supports 'conservation agriculture' – which aims to enable profitable farming while protecting and conserving natural resources – as an effective farming strategy in the context of climate change, particularly in the northern part of Ghana.
