Economic Growth and Agricultural Diversification Matters for Food and Nutrition Security in Ghana

Ghana is often considered an African development success story. Over the past two decades, the country experienced strong and steady economic growth in a stable and democratic political environment. Broad-based growth over the past two decades— during which the agricultural sector has been an important driver, thanks to its transformation—has led to impressive progress in poverty reduction. Ghana became the first African country to achieve the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) by halving the poverty rate of the 1990s ahead the targeted year of 2015 (UNDP 2008). It is also among the very few countries in SubSaharan Africa with a high probability of achieving the child nutrition-related target of MDG 1 (i.e. halving the prevalence of underweight children—measured by weight-for-height z-scores of children under 5 years of age—between 1990 and 2015).