Mr. Daniel Fahene Acquaye, Chief Executive Officer of Agri-Impact Limited, has called for an urgent shift in Ghana’s agribusiness strategy from repetitive pilot projects to full-scale implementation of proven models.
Addressing stakeholders at the National Agribusiness Dialogue, Mr. Acquaye challenged the sector’s continued reliance on pilot initiatives, describing it as a major barrier to progress and industrial transformation.
“When we want to enter agribusiness, the first thing that is talked about is, ‘Let us pilot.’ But the question is: pilot what exactly?” Mr. Acquaye asked, expressing frustration with what he sees as a counterproductive cycle of experimentation.
He argued that Ghana has accumulated decades of research, field trials, and practical case studies, which should be sufficient to inform confident and widespread implementation. “We have done so many pilots from the time that some of us were not born. Don’t we have enough evidence to prove that these are pilots?” he said.
According to Mr. Acquaye, this overdependence on pilots often delays real progress and causes Ghana’s agribusiness sector to fall behind global trends and innovations.
“The little that we know, let us scale them,” he urged. “It is better than going back five years to renew the research and pilot them again. By the time we are done with the piloting, industries have moved beyond the findings of the pilot and we have to pilot again.”
He called on stakeholders, governments, investors, researchers, and development agencies to prioritize the upscaling of already tested and successful agribusiness models.
Doing so, he said, would foster inclusive economic growth, create jobs, and strengthen value chains across Ghana’s agriculture sector.
The National Agribusiness Dialogue forms part of a broader effort to reposition agriculture as a driver of industrialization, particularly under Ghana’s medium-term development framework and food systems resilience initiatives.
Stakeholders emphasized the need for innovation, access to finance, and policy reforms to enable agribusinesses to thrive at scale.
