ABOUT SAWA Project
The SAWA Programme is creating dignified and fulfilling employment opportunities for young women across Ghana’s catfish value chain through an innovative, integrated aquaculture model. Anchored by the Adwenepa Hub, SAWA combines seven complementary delivery pathways that connect production, processing, technical support, feed production, marketing, and urban aquaculture into one sustainable ecosystem.
Our Delivery Models
¨ Adwenepa Hubs (Max & Pro)
¨ Urban Blue
¨ Feed-Crop Farmers
¨ Aqua Professionals
¨ Feed Mill & Hatchery
¨ Processing & Value Addition
¨ Marketing & Sales
Our Targets
¨ 16,000 Youth-in-Work opportunities over four years
¨ 12,000 direct jobs and 4,000 indirect jobs
¨ 40 women-led Adwenepa Hubs across Ghana
¨ 4,200 Urban Blue entrepreneurs
¨ 4,900 Feed-Crop Farmers
¨ 5% minimum inclusion of Persons with Disabilities
By placing young women at the centre as entrepreneurs and cooperative owners, SAWA is building a resilient, self-sustaining aquaculture value chain that strengthens food security, creates lasting livelihoods, and drives inclusive economic growth.
Our Job Part WAYS
Urban Blue: Fish Farming Moves to the City
Newage Agric Solutions is putting young women into catfish production — not on farmland, but in their own compounds.Ask most Ghanaians to picture a fish farm and they’ll describe the same thing: earthen ponds, somewhere rural, a good distance from town. It’s an accurate picture. It’s also the reason aquaculture has stayed out of reach for the young women who need income most — the ones living in Accra, Kumasi, Tema, Ho and the towns around them, where land is expensive and a pond is out of the question.
Urban Blue starts from a simple observation. You don’t need a pond to raise catfish. You need a tank, clean water, good juveniles, feed, and someone who knows what they’re doing standing beside you for the first few months.
Each participant brings the space. Newage brings everything else needed: Juveniles, Starter feed, A starter Kit including water-quality testing equipment, Training, before a single fish is delivered, Extension support through the whole first grow-out, A route to market through the programme’s marketing network
Participants are recruited in waves. Each wave moves through the same cycle: mobilisation, screening, training, delivery and stocking, grow-out with regular technical visits, then harvest and sale. Around eight months from first contact to first income.
Adwenepa: Five Businesses, One Compound, Happy Women
Newage Agric Solutions is building community aquaculture hubs across Ghana — each one owned and run by the women who work it. Most fish farming projects build a pond, stock it, and hope for the best. When the harvest is good, everyone celebrates. When it isn’t — a disease outbreak, a price crash, a bad cycle — there is nothing to fall back on, because the pond was the whole business. An Adwenepa hub is built differently. It is not a pond. It is a small, integrated enterprise with several income streams running at once, designed so that no single bad season can take it down.
Each Adwenepa hub brings together, on one site: Fish ponds producing African catfish across two cycles a year, A vegetable farm using the nutrient-rich pond water and generating income between fish harvests, A smoking unit, so fish can be preserved and sold as a higher-value product instead of dumped fresh at whatever price the day offers. A retail shop, letting the hub sell directly to its own community rather than surrendering the margin to a middleman, On-farm feed production; duckweed, azolla and, at suitable sites, black soldier fly larvae These are not add-ons. They are what makes the model work. Vegetables generate cash while the fish are still growing. The smoking unit turns a glut into stock that keeps. The shop captures retail margin. And the feed beds attack the single largest cost in aquaculture.
Aqua Professionals: The People Who Make the Fish Survive
Newage is training 500 young women as aquaculture professionals — building the technical profession Ghana’s fish industry has been missing. There is a gap between stocking a pond and harvesting one, and it is wider than most people expect.
After stocking our participants what comes out four or five months later depends on decisions taken in between — how densely they were stocked, whether the water was tested, how quickly a problem was spotted, whether anyone noticed the fish had grown at different rates and needed grading. Get those right and the great majority reach harvest. Get them wrong and a producer can lose most of a cycle without ever understanding why.
African catfish is a forgiving fish in many ways. It is hardy, it grows fast, it tolerates conditions that would kill more delicate species. But it has one dangerous habit: when fish in the same tank differ in size, the larger ones eat the smaller ones. A pond that is never graded can quietly
consume its own harvest. Nobody learns this from a leaflet. You learn it from someone who has seen it happen.
