John Boateng

Since 2003, Dr. John Boateng has pursued research in Agricultural and Extension Education related areas when he enrolled as PhD student in Demography and Extension Education at the Pennsylvania State University. He has terminal Degrees and backgrounds in Agricultural Sciences – Crop Science, Soil Science, Horticulture, Agricultural and Extension Education and Project Management. He defended his Ph.D. thesis in 2006. This was an ambitious project in which he analyzed national data from Ghana’s Demographic Health Survey to assess factors related to women’s access to and use of health care and family planning. The unique contribution of this study was the importance of social support networks and women’s self-determination as predictors of women’s access to health care, over and above social background factors. He is skilled in using information and communications technology and have participated in highly competitive national workshops and training seminars in analyses of large national datasets. John also completed a two year fellowship in monitoring and evaluation with the Great Lakes Agricultural Safety and Health project (GLCASH) at the Ohio State University, USA (2004-2006). He Joined the University of Ghana – School of Continuing and Distance Education as Lecturer in 2013 and got promoted to the rank of Senior Lecturer in 2016. He became recipient of the University of Ghana’s Research Fund Grant in 2014 and 2016, and the University of Michigan’s African Presidential Scholars Award that enabled him to spend six months in Ann Arbor, USA to research and write about the integration of e-learning into Adult Education in Ghana.

John won a grant from CODESRIA to pursue studies on ways to optimize instructor-student interactions for effective student teaching and learning in 2015. From 2017-2019, he collaborated with the Sentinel Project in Ghana as the M & E and Communications expert on the project “Social and environmental trade-offs in African agriculture”. Currently, John is partnering with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada’s Partnership Development Grant “Improving African Futures Using Lessons from the Past” as a Collaborator (Grant number: SSHRC 890-2017-0003). Dr. Boateng proposed research topic for the MIASA fellowship focused on gendered dynamics of social resilience to environmental changes: a comparative analysis of migrant and non-migrant farmers in the Eastern Region of Ghana. His research interests covers the following areas:

a. Energy efficient technologies to make agriculture more productive
b. Watershed management for sustainable agriculture
c. Soil and water conservation to reduce food-energy trade-offs
d. Technologies to make social and ecological stressors less harmful to farming systems
e. Promotion of Ecosystem based adaptation technologies
f. Community based education and capacity building in farmers to overcome social and ecological stressors
g. Climate change and sustainable agriculture
h. Climate smart agriculture
i. Sustainable rural transformation
j. Climate change adaptation and mitigation practices in agriculture