The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ghana is signalling a clear shift in its approach to the country’s horticulture sector: the years of capacity building are done; the priority now is investment.
That message was delivered publicly at the annual Horticulture Business Forum held on February 12, 2026 in Accra, where Ambassador H.E. Jeroen Verheul told farmers, financial institutions, agribusinesses and government representatives that the sector has the foundations it needs and must now attract finance at scale.
The forum, convened by the Embassy alongside partners Resilience BV, MDF West Africa and the Ghana-Netherlands Business and Culture Council (GNBCC), focused on a single question: how to unlock finance and accelerate growth across Ghana’s horticulture value chain.
The urgency is grounded in numbers. Ghana’s horticulture sector has been growing at around 10 percent annually, significantly outpacing the broader agricultural sector’s 3.3 percent average. Agriculture as a whole accounts for nearly 20 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and more than 30 percent of export earnings. Yet producers and cooperatives along the horticulture chain remain chronically underfinanced, hampered by high interest rates, limited collateral and a perception among financial institutions that the sector carries disproportionate risk.
Over the past four years, the Dutch Embassy and its partners have worked to address the structural conditions that make investment difficult: training more than 1,200 people in climate-smart farming and business skills, launching the Ghana Seed Partnership (GSP) in October 2025 with 13 stakeholders and research institutions including Wageningen University, and piloting a cold chain project that deployed solar-powered cooling tricycles to peri-urban farmers.
The most recent addition to that architecture is the Green, Digital and Inclusive Private Sector Development (GDI PSD) Programme, a EUR 17.3 million Team Europe initiative launched in January 2026. Co-financed by the European Union (EU) delegation, the Netherlands and France, and implemented under Ghana’s Ministry of Trade, Agribusiness and Industry (MOTAI), it targets improved access to green and digital finance for entrepreneurs, regulatory reform, and capacity building focused on women-led and youth-led businesses.
Ambassador Verheul’s broader argument is that the bilateral relationship has moved decisively from aid to trade since 2022, with horticulture and cocoa serving as the two anchor sectors where Dutch expertise and Ghanaian market needs converge. In that context, the forum on access to finance was not a technical event: it was a signal that the sector is ready to be treated as a commercial opportunity rather than a development project.
Ghana’s exports to the Netherlands reached EUR 650 million in 2024, up from EUR 450 million the year before, driven largely by cocoa and aluminium. The horticulture sector is not yet a major contributor to that figure, but the trajectory of Dutch engagement suggests that is precisely what the partnership is designed to change.
