The German Development Cooperation has partnered with Swiss-Ghanaian company KOA to transform Ghana’s underutilised cashew apples into commercially viable products, creating additional income opportunities for farmers, women and rural enterprises.

The initiative, launched on Wednesday, September 16, 2026, seeks to reduce the large volumes of cashew apples left as waste after farmers harvest the nuts, while creating new opportunities for local processing, job creation and investment.

Cashew apples can account for up to 90 per cent of the fruit’s mass but are often left to rot in the field after the nuts are harvested.

Through KOA’s Community Mobile Processing Unit approach, the partnership will support communities to collect and process cashew apples closer to farms and produce cashew apple juice, concentrate and dried cashew apple products for local and European markets.

The model is designed to reduce post-harvest losses, create value closer to the source of the raw material and connect community-level production to growing markets.

The project will work with women’s groups, cooperatives and farmer organisations, with a focus on building practical processing skills, strengthening market linkages and developing a production model that can be replicated across cashew-producing communities.

Head of the Private Sector and Innovation Promotion (PSInno) Programme at GIZ Ghana, Arlett Stojanovic, said the partnership demonstrates how development initiatives can create commercial opportunities.

“This partnership is about demonstrating that development impact and commercial opportunity can reinforce each other. Using this underutilised resource is creating new opportunities for farmers and private-sector investment,” she said.

For farmers, the initiative is expected to provide an additional source of income from the same harvest, while women and community enterprises could take on roles in processing, quality management and value addition.

KOA’s Director of Production and Operations, Daniel Otu, said the company sees significant untapped potential in the cashew apple.

“We see the cashew apple not as a waste product, but as an untapped raw material with the potential to support an entirely new layer of value creation in Ghana’s cashew industry,” he said.

“By bringing processing closer to farmers, we can help communities capture more value from the cashew they already produce while building products that can compete in local and international markets,” he added.

The partnership also seeks to attract investors and businesses into the emerging segment of Ghana’s cashew value chain by demonstrating a commercially sustainable model that can be scaled by the private sector.

The initiative is being implemented through GIZ’s PSInno and the Market-Oriented Value Chains for Jobs and Growth in the ECOWAS Region (MOVE-ComCashew), in partnership with KOA Impact and with support from develoPPP on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

The partners believe that increasing the economic value of cashew apples could help Ghana’s cashew sector move beyond traditional kernel production and create additional value from resources already available in farming communities.