Increasing productivity and production of rice is a major challenge facing the government of Ghana which spends >100 million dollars annually on rice imports. In Ghana, more than 50% of the rice lands can be described as upland and hydromorphic and these are distributed across the country. These are lands mostly used by the most vulnerable in society, i.e. women and the poor. In Ghana, very few rice varieties adapted to these ecologies have been formally released. Even where released varieties exist, their seed is neither readily available to the poor farmers nor necessarily the type of cvs farmers or consumers want. Participatory approaches, including Participatory Varietal Selection (PVS), offer one way to overcome these constraints by involving farmers directly in the process of variety improvement and testing, as well as by utilizing informal seed systems for dissemination.
