Bernice Daapah

Bernice Dapaah founded Bright Generation Community Foundation in Ghana with a deceptively simple premise: that rural women and youth already have the capacity to build sustainable livelihoods, what they lack is the infrastructure, training, and market access to make that capacity count. BGCF’s work sits at the intersection of agroforestry, community empowerment, and food security, with bamboo emerging as an unlikely but versatile centre of gravity for much of what the organization does.

Before winning the Outstanding Value-Adding Enterprise category at the 2023 WAYA competition, BGCF was doing meaningful work on constrained resources, funding gaps limited how far projects could go, and workforce challenges slowed implementation. The prize money opened room to move on several fronts at once. Twenty-three acres of bamboo, maize, and other crops were planted across rural communities, combining carbon sequestration, soil conservation, and direct market access for farm produce and poultry feed. Two women’s groups received micro-credit and farming inputs to expand their operations, resulting in increased yields and revenues. Thirteen youth received technical training in plantation development through collaborations with Envirotech Bamboo Limited and the Forestry Commission. Ten women were hired as casual workers on BGCF’s farms. Revenue grew by 25%.

The work developing since the award points to where Bernice’s ambitions are heading. A Bamboo Greenhouse Project is in preparation, two community-based greenhouses to be constructed using locally sourced bamboo, designed to stabilize food production and improve livelihoods in rural areas where agro-productivity has historically been low. A joint proposal is in development to train young men and women in delivery services using electric bamboo bicycles, a circular economy initiative that turns the same crop at the heart of BGCF’s farming model into a logistics solution. And an MOU signed with the CSIR Crops Research Institute will explore converting bamboo into timber and related products, extending the value chain further still.

What WAYA gave Bernice, beyond capital, was the credibility to deepen institutional relationships, with ministries, research bodies, and investors who now see BGCF as a serious partner in Ghana’s agricultural development. For an organization whose founding bet was that rural communities hold more potential than the resources available to them, that kind of recognition is precisely the point.