The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Unit of the Presidency, has commended Casa de Ropa Limited, an agribusiness company specialized in orange-fleshed sweet potato farming and food processing, for its compliance and promotion of the SDGs.
According to the SDGs Advisory Unit, Casa de Ropa, one of the pioneer One District, One Factory (1D1F) companies, has demonstrated best practices that are geared toward attainment of about 14 of the 17 SDGs, a procedure worth touting for other agribusinesses and corporate bodies to emulate.
Head of SDGs Advisory Unit, Office of the President, Dr. Eugene Owusu indicated that his office is impressed with what Casa de Ropa is doing and wants to use them as model organizational operation for what the SDGs are about at the community level.
He added that the business model of the company, which is truly about changing lives and livelihood of the people in the Gomoa East Districts, one of the poorest districts in the Central Region, is fully aligned with the SDGs
“We need to take this to scale as a country, we need about 100 Casa de Ropa in Ghana to deal with many of the challenges we face in this country in terms of employment creation, social impact, environmental protection, mechanical agriculture, value addition, import substitution, and human resource development among others,” he said.
He added that a simple observation of the company’s model of operation such as, employment of 160 direct workers and 154 out grower farmers with 90 percent being females, recycling of by-products from its processed materials, demonstration farms, in partnership with education institutions and the Crop Research Institute (CRI) to develop new varieties of rice and other food crops and offering intention opportunity to university students in agriculture science, address about 14 of the 17 SDGs.
Dr. Owusu, indicated that the country’s voluntary national review report in 2019, showed that the country is doing quite well in most of the social goals, performed averagely on the economic goals but off track on the environmental goals and that is a concern the nation should tackle with all hands-on deck.
Chief Executive Officer, Casa de Ropa, Ebenezer Obeng Baffour, reiterated that beyond specialization in production and processing of sweet potatoes, the company has decided to set up a model for the youth and future leaders to follow with the aim to mechanize agriculture in the country.
“The various things we do here compliment each other and we want to design a model here for people to come, learn and take it from here to go and produce on large scale, whilst we are also available to buy back the produce. We have currently trained eight graduates from Cape Coast University for one-year and we will be taking another 20 graduates in the next cycle,” he said.
Furthermore, he expressed his gratitude to the SDG Office and also emphasized the organizations desire to work together with the SDGs office to make sure the various SDGs are actualized on the field of work and not only in policy.
