The Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana (PFAG) says the country’s flagship agricultural risk-sharing institution has not delivered any tangible benefit to its members, raising questions about who is actually being served by a mechanism designed to open formal credit to farmers.
Wepia A. Awal Adugwala, National President of PFAG, said the association has heard of the Ghana Incentive-Based Risk-Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (GIRSAL) but stated plainly that his members have “not had any benefit from them.” The assessment was not a pointed attack on the institution but a matter-of-fact observation that its activities, whatever form they have taken, have not reached the smallholder communities that arguably stand to benefit most.
GIRSAL is a non-banking financial institution established to de-risk agricultural financing and stimulate increased lending to the agricultural sector by financial institutions in Ghana, providing credit risk guarantees to financial institutions alongside capacity building, information resources and expert technical support. It is a limited liability company wholly owned by the Government of Ghana through the Ministry of Finance and is capitalised with seed funding from the Bank of Ghana (BoG) and the African Development Bank (AfDB).
Through its Credit Risk Guarantee Scheme, GIRSAL has partnered with 35 financial institutions to facilitate GHS 1.2 billion in agricultural loans for over 137 agribusinesses, creating and sustaining more than 2,990 jobs and positively impacting over 67,000 farmers and workers. But Adugwala’s account suggests these gains have not extended meaningfully into the smallholder segment, where the vast majority of Ghana’s farming population operates.
His concern mirrors a pattern he identified at the Agricultural Development Bank (ADB), which he described as concentrating its lending activities on commercial-scale farmers rather than smallholders. Farmers who lack land title documentation, off-take agreements and established institutional relationships remain locked out of formal credit channels, he argued, regardless of how many support structures exist on paper.
Adugwala has previously renewed PFAG’s call for a dedicated credit desk for smallholder farmers within ADB, with disbursement channels extended through rural banks and Ghana Commercial Bank (GCB) to reach farming communities beyond the reach of formal financial institutions, noting that smallholder farmers supply between 70 and 80 percent of all foodstuffs sold in Ghanaian markets.
Adugwala welcomed government discussions around agricultural insurance as a related but separate instrument for managing farm-level risk, and signalled PFAG’s willingness to engage in those deliberations. The Ministry of Food and Agriculture has proposed rolling out the Ghana Agricultural Insurance Scheme through subsidies, providing insurance coverage for smallholder farmers to enhance their access to credit. Adugwala was careful, however, to distinguish between insurance and credit access, arguing that both are necessary and that one cannot substitute for the other.
What farmers need, in his assessment, is a comprehensive package: accessible credit, risk mitigation tools such as insurance, and irrigation infrastructure that reduces dependence on rainfall, working in concert rather than in isolation.
PFAG’s position is that government must convene a structured stakeholder dialogue to design lending products that reflect the actual realities of smallholder farming, and that institutions including GIRSAL and ADB must be held accountable not merely for their mandates but for their measurable reach into rural communities. Without that accountability, Adugwala argued, Ghana’s agricultural finance architecture will remain more visible in policy documents than in the fields where most of the country’s food is grown.
