I am writing with my good wishes for 2024, and to share some highlights of progress made during 2023 by HJA Africa’s OFA liquid fertilizer for all crops.

First, thank you for your interest, support, or partnership with us at HJA Africa. So many people helped us make 2023 a year of significant progress for OFA, and we appreciate you all.

Our mission is to catalyse doubling net farm incomes across Ghana and then Africa sustainably, and so transform the continent’s development.

In 2023 we made some early strides towards this, by adding up to $10m to farm profits in Ghana, and by building foundations for greatly increasing that figure in the coming year in Ghana and its neighbours.

We increased our sales close to 3 times compared to 2022, helped by a significant advertising campaign including recruiting Anim Addo, who is Ghana’s best-known agriculture journalist, to become an OFA brand ambassador. 

We have demonstrated some significant Unique Selling Points for OFA for the key crops of rice and mango.

For rice, field trials showed OFA to be more effective against rice blast disease than synthetic fungicides costing more than twice as much, on top of OFA accelerating time to harvest by ten days and giving substantial yield increases.

For mango, OFA is proving effective in many farmer trials against the most serious problem for most mango farmers in Ghana, BBS (Bacterial Black Spot) as well as assisting flowering, reducing flower drop, dealing with mealybugs, helping solve anthracnose, and generally substantially increasing yields, all at low cost.

For cocoa, we are getting excellent feedback from the growing numbers of farmers using OFA across Ghana.

OFA won awards as Outstanding Ghana-made fertilizer at the 2023 Ghana Agricultural and Agro-Processing Awards and African Organic Fertilizer of the Year at the 2023 African Agricultural Excellence and Leadership Awards. We are grateful for this recognition of our growing impact and success.  

We continued partnerships with several research institutions including CSIR SARI who published important journal papers confirming OFA’s outstanding cost-effectiveness for maize and cowpea, based on three years of fieldwork results. We are also starting new research trials of OFA with the West African Centre for Crop Improvement, to demonstrate how OFA can cut production costs whilst increasing yields for vegetables.

We completed the registration of OFA for use in Togo and made progress on registration in Burkina Faso. We also registered with Ecowas for import tariff-free exports of OFA within West Africa, ready to expand OFA sales into Ghana’s neighbours in 2024.

We made significant improvements to our production facilities, and now have capacity to produce 1.5 million litres a year of OFA, sufficient to treat up to 3 million acres of crops for the growing season, and more than enough to meet Ghana’s fertilizer requirements. 

We strengthened some of our internal systems and are continuing work on others, including a new Monitoring Evaluation and Learning system, to ensure we are well-prepared for further growth in both impact and sales in 2024. 

We are very grateful to GIZ for awarding us a grant in 2023 which has significantly assisted our progress.

Once again, our thanks to all of you who have helped us in ‘23, and we look forward to achieving much more in ‘24!

Wishing you a very happy and healthy new year!

Henry