Our Programs & Initiatives

To ensure that communities take lead in meeting their long term developmental needs in a context of ownership and sustainability, our interventions use a participatory planning process — an approach of Community–Driven Development which encourages communities to assume full control over planning decisions for local development projects. This community-led approach uses focus group discussions to identify development challenges, local resources, and actions/activities in addressing problems related to intervention areas while making linkages to District Assemblies' development plans for further support.

Nature Aid Ghana supports communities to conduct community needs assessment, identify priority needs, and select interventions or actions and sequence such interventions based on urgency, relevance, priority and define a set of roles and responsibilities in addressing such gaps. The process engages focal groups of men, women, youth and children and the community leadership separately after which community-wide prioritization takes place.

One of the major and notable strategies used to empower farmers in the achievement of all project goals is the VSLA approach. Communities are mobilized into groups within operational areas with savings and loans opportunities. The Village Savings and Loan (VSL) group model is a self-managed and self-capitalized microfinance methodology that mobilizes local pools of investment finance for its members. It offers savings, insurance and credit services in markets outside the reach of formal financial institutions.

Association members are self-selected (membership of between 15–25 or 30 people) and self-governed. The VSL groups are empowered to meet on a weekly basis to deposit their savings and take loans monthly (every 4 weeks). Members of the scheme are coached on how to save, how to disburse and repay loans as well as how to share out their accumulated savings at the end of every year.

The role of NAG has been to create the associations, train them on the VSLA methodology, and provide them ongoing support during the first nine or twelve months' cycle of savings and credit. After this period, the VSLAs become independent and have little or no need for further assistance.

Nature Aid Ghana is already working in parts of the Ashanti, Western, Ahafo and Central regions on this scheme.

Nature Aid before full implementation of interventions conducts surveys to capture benchmark information and the prevailing conditions regarding focus areas and analyses them for project purposes. Famous among them are the Ghana Child labor data collection or GCLMRS data and gender data. Specifically, the strategy aims to:

Nature Aid Ghana adopts good community entry techniques, sensitizations and creates awareness on issues of concern such as information on child labor, promotion of primary school education and women empowerment strategies, extension services, health education, VSLA and gender sensitive information etc. Target groups include community leadership, entire communities, women groups, farmer groups, Faith Based Organizations, youth groups among others.

Nature Aid closely works and collaborates with decentralized governmental departments at the district and regional levels to ensure the smooth implementation of programme goals and objectives. Other stakeholders include communities, public, private and non-profit organizations involved in the development of the area especially the cocoa value chain at the project districts.

Stakeholder engagement promotes effective ownership and sustainability of the programmes.

Continuous assessment and objective examination of progress towards the objectives of a program or project has been relevant for decision making. NAG provides daily field technical support and periodic project evaluation exercises for decision making. Feedbacks are recycled into implementation process and manages reports on monthly basis internally. There are quarterly reports of activities implemented, outputs, outcomes and impacts as well as a well analyzed MIS data of all VSLA groups to sponsors and donors.