Market Innovation for Sustainable Soil Health Management in Ghana

This PhD research examines how agricultural markets in Ghana can be better organized to help smallholder farmers improve soil health sustainably.  Healthy soils are vital for good harvests and food security, but farmers often cannot access the combination of inputs and services they need in time.

Rather than focusing only on individual farmers, the research looks at how the entire market system works. It combines stakeholder interviews, farmer surveys, conjoint experiments, and stakeholder analysis to rethink smallholder market organization, diagnose Ghana’s soil health system, and outline how smallholder markets can better support sustainable soil health based on farmer preferences and stakeholder motivations and capabilities.

The study shows that farmers prefer solutions that combine inputs, credit, training, sustainability support, and crop sales into simple, coordinated packages. It also shows that while many stakeholders exists to support soil health, they work in isolation. Stakeholders identified certain integrated contributions as most promising, suggesting that aligning roles across stakeholders could reorganize the system to provide coordinated, farmer-centered support.