Agriculture in African South of the Sahara (SSA) can be transformed if the right public support is provided at the initial stage, and it can sustain itself once the enabling environment is put in place. Successes are also specific to the location of projects. In Ghana, interesting insights are...

The Government of Ghana (GoG) since 2007 has been providing subsidized agricultural machines to individual farmers and private enterprises established as specialized Agricultural Mechanization Services Enterprise Centers (AMSECs) to offer tractor-hire services to small-scale farmers across the...

This paper assesses the sustainability of the current supply network for mechanization, given government policy. Stylized models of mechanization supply are developed based on experience in Bangladesh, China, and India during similar stages of agricultural transformation. Ghana’s supply...

This paper assesses whether tractor investment is a rational and profitable decision for farmers using firm investment theory and tractor owner survey data collected in 2013. Under erratic rainfalls, timeliness of farming operations is critical for farmers. Based on the hypothesis that owning a...

Even though the intention of the government is to promote private sector-led mechanization, findings suggest that the AMSEC model is unlikely to be a profitable business model attractive to private investors even with the current level of subsidy. The low tractor utilization rate as a result of...

"Ghana is an emerging success story in Africa and in a couple of years will become the first African country to achieve the first Millennium Development Goal of halving its national poverty rate. The government of Ghana has therefore extended its development vision and recently declared the goal...

Influential studies in the 1980s and early 1990s drew on the Boserup–Ruthenberg theories of farming systems evolution to argue that African countries were not yet ready for widespread agricultural mechanization. Through applying the theories of farming systems evolution and of induced...