Horticulture CRSP Newsletter Project Highlight: Sweet potato flour: a "golden" opportunity for Ghana

Description

This article was featured in the Horticulture CRSP Newsletter (Volume 1, Issue 3, November 2010), highlighting the project "Increasing nutrients in traditional diets with orange-fleshed sweet potatoes" in Ghana.  The principal investigator on this project is Eunice Bonsi, Tuskegee University. Below is an excerpt from the article:

"Vitamin A deficiency compromises immunity and robs sight from 250 million children in the world’s poorest regions. For families in West Africa, the best sources of vitamin A are orange vegetables and leafy greens. Furthermore, growing orange‐fleshed sweet potatoes is a good bet for subsistence‐level farmers because they can be grown on marginal lands and in low‐input systems. West Africans can enjoy many benefits from growing and consuming more of these orange‐fleshed bundles of vitamins. However, in Ghana, most of the sweet potato
varieties farmers grow have white flesh and meager amounts of vitamin A.

The Crop Research Institute (CRI) recently released several varieties of the orange‐fleshed sweet potato that contain significantly higher amounts of vitamin A. Collaborative effort among researchers at the University of Ghana and Tuskegee University has shown that sweet potato products are easily incorporated in local dishes, and Ghanaians are willing to pay more for bread made of orange‐fleshed sweet potato flour.

The USAID funded Horticulture CRSP has teamed up with Tuskegee University, CRI and the University of Ghana to implement an orange‐fleshed sweet potato project in Ghana. This collaborative effort increases the consumption of orange‐fleshed sweet potato in Ghana through a three-pronged approach that addresses production, postharvest processing and markets..."

Value Chain

Nutrition

Countries

Ghana