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This paper assessed the causal effect of women empowerment in agriculture (WEA) on household food security in the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) zone of Ghana.

The study used the extended probit regression with endogenous treatment to account for potential endogeneity of empowerment and food security using data from the United States Agency for International Development's (USAID) Feed the Future baseline survey.

All three indicators of women empowerment positively impact food security. In specific terms, when women participate in crop and livestock decision-making in the household, and when they have access to cultivable lands, their households have lower probabilities of being severely or moderately hungry. Also, crop decision-making exhibits the highest impact on food security.

While there may be several policy options to eradicate food insecurity challenges in Ghana, the policy measure of empowering women in agriculture needs attention. Priority should be given to empowering them in production decision-making.

There is the need to sensitise households on the importance of women decision-making within the household and their access to land.

In the context of the empowerment literature, from our search, this study is the first in applying the hunger scale as a measure of food security and represents the first attempt at examining the effect of women empowerment on food security in Ghana.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the connections between financial inclusion and agricultural commercialization among farmers in Ghana.

In order to address endogeneity and sample selectivity bias, the study employs endogenous switching regressions (ESRs) to examine whether financially included and financially excluded maize farm households differ in their commercialization behavior and whether financial inclusion affects commercialization. The Heckman Treatment Effect (HTE) model is used to test for robustness of the results. The data used contain a random sample of 2,230 maize farmers across the ten regions of Ghana.

The results from the ESRs show that financial inclusion significantly fosters agricultural commercialization. Specifically, financially included households sell 13.25 percent more output than their financially excluded counterparts. In terms of the counterfactual, financially excluded households would have sold 5.04 percent more output if they were to have access to financial services. Results from the HTE model confirm that financial inclusion promotes agricultural commercialization.

Financial inclusion is low among maize farmers; this implies that there are more benefits to be gained by ensuring that farmers have access to a broad range of financial services.

The findings imply that the quest for the integration of smallholder farmers into markets cannot overlook measures to ensure financial inclusion.

It represents the first attempt at linking financial inclusion to agricultural commercialization using econometric methodology. The study serves as a foundation paper and for that matter will serve as a guide to future research on the financial inclusion-agricultural commercialization nexus.

The purpose of this paper is to examine farmers’ access to credit, credit constraint, and productivity in the Northern Savannah ecological zone of Ghana.

Secondary data from the Ghana Feed the Future baseline survey involving a total sample of 2,968 farm households were used. The conditional mixed process (CMP) framework was applied to estimate access to credit, credit constraint, and productivity simultaneously. As a system estimator the CMP corrects for possible heterogeneity and sample selection bias.

The results from the estimations revealed that age, literacy, farm non-mechanized equipment, and group membership were the variables influencing farmers’ access to credit. Credit constraint conditions were determined by household size, locality, group membership, and household durable assets. Finally, the results showed that productivity of farmers was dependent on marital status, household size, locality, farm size, commercialization, farm mechanized equipment, group membership, and household durable assets.

This paper is the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to use the CMP framework to jointly estimate access to credit, credit constraint, and productivity. The results indicate that estimating credit access and constraint models separately would have yielded biased estimates. Thus, this paper informs future research on farmers’ credit access, credit constraint, and productivity for informed policymaking.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the issues and challenges faced by headteachers in practicing the suggested distributed leadership (DL) approach in three primary schools to their middle layer leaders.

The study employed a case study design and data were collected through semi-structured interviews. A total of three headteachers were interviewed in examining and exploring challenges within the DL practices. The transcripts from the semi-structured interviews formed the basis of the findings.

The findings suggest that senior teachers lack confidence in making decisions and rely on the consent from headteachers even though they are empowered to make their own decisions. Another significant issue faced by headteachers when distributing their leadership is the ability, expertise, experience, and willingness of teachers to hold leadership roles and responsibilities.

The results are important since there have been few empirical studies on the issues and challenges faced by headteachers in practising DL approach in primary schools in the context of Malaysia. This initiative sidelines the traditional school leadership approach which emphasises on the accountability of headteachers as the sole school leader.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the motivations of timber firms in Ghana to undertake environmental accounting and reporting (EAR) and the perceived benefits from it.

Survey method involving primary data from a census of 13 timber firms in Kumasi (Ghana) and descriptive statistics including Kendall’s coefficient were used to analyze the perceptions of practitioners on EAR.

The study offered support for the political economy, legitimacy and stakeholder theories generally applied to the study of EAR. Specifically, the study concluded that EAR is common to timber firms in Ghana. Pressure from government, media, shareholders’ influence and the existence of environmental committee or department in the company are perceived to influence timber firms’ level of environmental disclosure. Meanwhile, perceived benefits from EAR include fostering cordial relationship between timber firms and the society, preventing government fines and improving firm reputation.

The presence of biases in the responses of survey method studies can be difficult to eliminate. However, given the benefits associated with getting practitioners views on EAR and the reliability/validity procedures that the instruments and respondents were subjected to, this weakness was reduced to its barest minimum.

The study recommends that governments should adopt green tax policy to encourage EAR while regulatory bodies make EAR mandatory.

This study contributes to the discussion on EAR from the perspective of practitioners in the timber industry of Ghana, which has been neglected in previous studies.