Agriculture and Climate Empowerment Centre (ACEC) empowers communities to adopt strategies that will enhance resilience to climate change and improve people’s livelihoods, thus ensuring sustainable development.

Over the years, the mangroves have been used for charcoal production, firewood extraction, and smoke fish. The excessive consumption of mangrove wood leaves the coastal and riversides degraded and, in turn, depletes the fish population and loss incomes to the people living in the area. The community members acknowledge the problem and call for a solution with ACEC’s help in training and resources.

Ultimately, this intervention will lead to increase knowledge on mangrove conservation and sustainable utilisation of natural resources within Dago fishing community. Enhance the ecological integrity of the coastline of Dago and the community’s climate resilience and improve the lives of 5,000 men, women and children.

Short term, mangroves will be restored, allowing for more spawning grounds and the growth of fish. This will revive jobs lost. The planting of mangroves along the coastal line in Gomoa West District in the Central Region of Ghana will restore the mangrove’s biodiversity and enhance the community’s livelihood.

With the donations through iMPACT direct, ACEC will purchase propagules (i.e. mangrove seedlings) and train nursery workers to grow the seedlings. This requires a budget of GHS 42,000 (or €5,787).

This is part of a bigger project in which ACEC supports planting of tree species along lagoons and rivers and provides conservation education and public awareness campaigns as well as community training on sustainable natural resource conservation and management.

This has led to the unexpected outcome of improved sanitation and hygiene practices among the community folk. It has also led to the restoration and growth of small fishes that use the mangroves as spawning grounds.

The project aims to protect and encourage the sustainable use of mangrove forests along the southeastern coast of the Gomoa West district in Ghana. To increase communities resilience against climate change, ACEC implemented a mangrove restoration project in Ghana.

In addition, 87 households culminating into 435 people (a household has an average of 5 individuals) benefitting from education and training on conservation awareness and environmental protection.

Altogether, it has increased resilience of the community to climate change.

Follow up

The livelihoods of about 40 women and men have been sustained by the restoration of the ecosystem in the area. Men have gone back to fishing as a source of livelihoods while women continue to do their fish processing in enormous proportions. This has improved the socio-economic livelihoods of the community folk while providing incomes leading to a general improvement in the lives of the beneficiaries before the inception of the project.