President Nana Addo Dankwah Akufu Addo has commissioned the Sekyere Maize Processing Factory, located in Nsuta Kwagye in the Sekyere Central District of the Ashanti Region.
Construction of the Sekyere Maize Processing One District, One Factory (1D1F) plant began in January 2020; the project was completed at a cost of GHC6.7 million and handed over in June 2022. It has state-of-the-art maize processing equipment with a daily capacity to process four to five tonnes of dry maize, as well as five tonnes of maize grits.
The processing equipment installed at the factory includes a maize drying plant and a grit milling machine. The factory has a standby generator and a mechanised borehole to supply water.
In addition, the plant has a warehouse, fully furnished office accommodation for staff, a conference room, a laboratory room and a canteen for workers.
The 1D1F Common User Facility (CUF) is a farmer-owned agro-industrial processing facility, established with seed funding from the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MoTI) under the Rural Enterprises Programme (REP).
The CUF 1D1F programme was conceived in 2017 after policy direction by MoTI to realign the REP to be consistent with the Government of Ghana’s Industrial Transformation Agenda, which is being implemented by the Ministry of Trade.
The model seeks to enhance the ability of farmers and other actors in the agricultural value chain with little or no financial capacity to establish their own common user processing facilities to process their farm produce.
In response to this access constraint, the Ministry of Trade sought funding from the African Development Bank (AfDB) to establish CUFs in five districts, including the Sekyere maize processing facility. The CUFs have been set up in selected areas where farmers who are engaged in the same commodity value chains lack facilities to enable them to process the output from their farms.
The CUF 1D1F is owned by a group of maize farmers and other stakeholders with the following shareholding structure: 70% by the Sekyere Central Union of Maize Producers’ Associations (the mother association of all maize farmer-based organisations (FBOs) in the Sekyere Central District of Ashanti); 20% by the Ministry of Trade and Industry; and 10% by the traditional council.
The Sekyere Central Union of Maize Producers’ Associations comprises 18 individual FBOs. The total membership of the FBOs is roughly 600 farmers.
The Sekyere Maize Processing Factory is expected to employ about 118 workers directly, including management professionals, factory floor workers and plantation management staff who will work on nucleus maize farms.
In addition, over 600 farmers from the associations will be engaged directly as contract suppliers who will provide maize for the factory.
