Land, Credit, and Voice: Structural Barriers Facing Smallholder Women Farmers under the Feed Ghana Programme

Smallholder women farmers in Ghana occupy a paradoxical position: they numerically dominate the agricultural labour force yet are systematically excluded from the three most consequential productive resources: land, credit, and institutional voice that determine agricultural success. The Feed Ghana Programme (FGP, 2025–2028), Ghana's flagship agricultural transformation initiative, identifies women as a priority group and articulates gender-inclusive commitments across its framework, yet its operational architecture leaves the structural barriers underpinning women's exclusion substantively intact. Drawing on a feminist political ecology framework and a mixed-methods research design encompassing systematic policy analysis, focus group discussions (FGDs) with smallholder women farmers, and key informant interviews (KIIs) with programme and policy stakeholders, this article provides a theoretically grounded and empirically substantiated analysis of how land access, financial exclusion, and exclusion from decision-making combine to produce a mutually reinforcing system of structural disadvantage, termed here a 'triple exclusion' that cannot be addressed through women's nominal inclusion in programme documentation alone. Findings reveal that customary land tenure arrangements deprive women of the foundational asset upon which all other programme access is predicated; collateral-based credit architectures render financial instruments inaccessible precisely to those they nominally target; and male-dominated governance structures ensure that women's practical knowledge and strategic interests are systematically excluded from programme design and implementation decisions. Benchmarked against the African Union's Malabo Declaration, UN Women's Gender-Responsive Budgeting standards, the CGIAR Gender Typology, and the FAO's Gender and Agrifood Systems Programme, the FGP falls systematically short of the binding commitments necessary to close the gender gap in Ghanaian agriculture. The article argues that addressing triple exclusion requires not incremental adjustments but gender-transformative structural reform and concludes with theoretically grounded and practically oriented recommendations for programme reform, ActionAid Ghana's advocacy agenda, and future research.