The Agricultural Development Bank of Ghana was established with an explicit developmental mandate: to provide financial services to the agricultural sector and support the growth of farming activity across the country. Decades later, the Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana says the institution is falling significantly short of that mandate where it matters most, in the rural communities where the majority of Ghana’s smallholder farmers live and work.
Wepia A. Awal Adugwala, National President of the Association, identified three compounding failures in ADB’s reach. The first is geographic. He noted that the bank operates branches in a limited number of locations across the country, leaving many farming communities, particularly those in remote rural areas, without any physical access point. For farmers who cannot travel to the nearest ADB branch, the institution may as well not exist.
The second failure is demographic. Adugwala observed that even in areas where ADB is accessible, the bank’s lending tends to flow toward commercial-scale farmers rather than toward the smallholder segment. Larger operators, who are better formalised and able to provide the documentation and collateral that ADB requires, are better positioned to navigate the bank’s processes. Smallholder farmers, by contrast, typically lack formal land titles, off-take agreements, and credit histories, the very instruments that ADB uses to evaluate and approve loan applications.
The third failure is structural. Even where smallholder farmers are aware of ADB and attempt to engage with it, the standard lending requirements act as a filter that systematically excludes them. Collateral demands tied to land documentation are particularly prohibitive: land in rural Ghana is frequently held under customary tenure arrangements that do not produce the formal title deeds that banks recognise as security. The cost of formalising such land, even where it is possible, is beyond the means of most smallholder farmers.
Adugwala proposed a model that would allow ADB to dramatically extend its effective reach without requiring a costly physical branch expansion. Under his proposal, ADB would establish a dedicated credit facility for smallholder farmers and disburse that credit through a network of rural banks and Ghana Commercial Bank branches, both of which maintain a significantly wider footprint across the country. This disbursement-through-partners model would allow ADB’s capital and mandate to reach communities it currently cannot serve directly, while leveraging existing banking infrastructure rather than building new capacity from scratch.
He also called for the development of lending products specifically designed around the realities of smallholder agriculture, products that account for seasonal income patterns, informal land tenure arrangements, and the absence of conventional collateral. The Association’s view is that ADB, as a state institution with a developmental mandate, is not held to the same commercial imperatives as private sector banks and therefore has both the flexibility and the obligation to design products that serve farmers the private sector will not touch.
Until those structural changes are made, Adugwala warned, the credit gap will persist, and its consequences, low productivity, post-harvest losses, inability to compete with imports, and deepening rural poverty, will continue to accumulate in silence.
