1. Workin’ the Shea Sector

Never mind that cream you find in the Body Shop; this is the real pure, unrefined all-natural stuff! (However, Body Shop does source all its Shea butter from Ghana which has huge benefits for the local women.)

Shea butter is made from nuts that are picked, boiled, dried, cracked, crushed, grinded, and beaten, separated, heated and finally re-cooled into a pale yellow butter by the amazingly hard-working rural women of West Africa.

All of the steps mentioned above are done by hand except for the grinding which is usually done at a grinding mill. It is hard, hard, hard work and if you look at the butter makers’ arms you’d think they were weight lifters – serious guns!

Shea butter is gaining a lot of popularity in Europe and America for use in luxury cosmetics but in Ghana it’s still used in the rural villages in its unrefined form for its skin healing and protecting properties.

“How does this link to your work?” you ask. Well, since March 1^st, I have been working with a HUGE project ($103 million dollars of funding by IFAD, Government of Ghana, and the African Development Bank) called the Northern Rural Growth Programme (NRGP). Simply put, my job within NRGP is to try and make these hard-working Shea nut pickers and butter processors more money.

The district I’m using to pilot my interventions is Bawku West and I have three pilot interventions that I’m testing out.

One has nut exports training local women to produce higher quality nuts that they would receive a premium (above market) price for.

The second intervention is working with groups producing soaps from the butter to determine their constraints to selling more product. For a constraint of supply then we can help by training more women on soap making to help expand existing businesses with recruitment. For the constraint of demand (i.e. the products don’t sell well) then we determine why the products aren’t selling and address with support for improving the quality of the product, efficiency of the process, and marketing (signs, packaging, promotional events, etc).

Finally, the third intervention tries to get suppliers of gum boots, gloves and cutlasses to travel to local villages so the women have an opportunity to buy these goods that are generally only available in larger towns and cities. These items help protect the women from snake bites (snakes go after the fruit that surrounds the Shea nut so the women’s hands and snake mouths are often in the same place). The going estimates suggest 1% of women are bit and 10% of those bites are fatal. With 600 000 women picking Shea nuts, you do the math.