FIELD UPDATE – GHANA AGRICULTURAL MARKETS: My Meeting at the Ghana Commodity Exchange (GCX) on July 1st, 2019
07/16/2019 | by Yaw Nyarko
Touring the GCX offices and trading floor
L-R: Professor Chris Udry, our friend/supporter, and Dr. Kadri Alfah ringing the GCX trading bell
On July 1, 2019, I met with my research collaborator Professor Chris Udry, a great development economist at Northwestern University; Dr. Kadri Alfah, the Chief Executive Officer for the newly created Ghana Commodity Exchange (GCX) who set up the exchange in record time with his team; and a friend/supporter of my research on Ghana’s agricultural markets. After a very productive meeting, we are all looking forward to seeing impact from GCX. We are working on it. Stay tuned!
L-R: Our friend/supporter and Dr. Kadri Alfah ringing the GCX trading bell
L-R: Dr. Kadri Alfah, Professor Chris Udry, our friend/supporter with a CTED/GCX deployment gift
Ghana Agricultural Markets Overview: The goal of our research is to understand how improved markets for agricultural commodities can transform the agricultural value chain from farmers and their farming systems on the one hand, to firms and their purchasing and planning systems on the other. We focus on the rural economy in sub-Saharan Africa, using Ghana as our principal study area. Our belief in the power of sustained, organized, or centralized markets comes from many sources, but primarily through the history of the ingenuity of Ghanaian farmers themselves. Our research measures the importance of having sustained output markets and will examine how market innovations can kick-start agricultural transformations.