The shea tree is a West African plant frequently found in villages and surrounding areas. The tree produces shea nuts towards the beginning of the rainy season. If the rainy season is generous, the trees produce many nuts. The tree’s wood burns very easily, and rural populations cut great numbers of shea trees to make charcoal.

Thanks to efforts by the agents of the Forest and Waters Departments and of village associations fighting against desertification, shea trees continue to exist.

Rural women – who are the people most affected by poverty – lead the efforts to process shea nuts into shea butter. When women sell shea butter in the marketplace, the income allows them to support their families. As detailed in the script, these women would greatly benefit if they had machinery such as a mill because it would help them transform the shea nut into a softer paste. Machinery would also help make the processing quicker and less tiring than processing by hand.

The Song-Taaba Yalgré organisation represents the interests of Burkina Faso’s shea butter producers, most of whom are rural women, by helping them to improve production and boost sales. Song-Taaba Yalgré itself is based in Ouagadougou, but most of its 2,000 members live in remote areas so communication is difficult, time-consuming and costly. The organisation therefore developed an ICT project to address this problem, with promising results.

SAGNARIGU, Jun 11, 2008 (IPS) – “Wherever I went, they laughed at me and called me ‘Habiba the empty mouth.’ I was always embarrassed,” says 45-year-old Habiba Alhassan. “I could not afford to smile; I could not open my mouth in public, when I took photographs I had to close my mouth so that I wouldn’t look ugly.”

With all her front teeth missing, Alhassan was an object of mockery in her village, Sagnarigu, in the northern region of Ghana. Too poor to afford artificial teeth, she seemed destined to live with the embarrassment for life. “My petty trade in cocoa drinks was hardly enough to feed me let alone replace my lost teeth,” she said.

But all that changed early last year, when she joined a rural women’s cooperative producing soap from shea butter. In less than six months, she was able to save more than $300 from her earnings to replace the missing teeth. “Nobody believed me when I said I was determined to replace the missing teeth, now I have done it,” Habiba said proudly.

The cooperative, known as the Ideal Woman Shea Butter Producers and Pickers Association is the product of a poverty eradication initiative for rural women in Northern Ghana. The initiative is backed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Japanese government under the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD). TICAD is a global framework for collaboration between Asia and Africa to promote economic development in Africa.

On a recent sunny afternoon in Minna, Nigeria, Thompson Ogunsanmi had a list of new developments in the area’s shea sector to share. It was a long list.

Activity in the shea business has increased rapidly in the last year thanks at least partly to last year’s industry conference and the concentrated efforts of shea stakeholders in Nigeria. With “Global Shea 2010: Maximizing Quality, Expanding Markets” set for March 16-19 in Bamako, Mali, many are expecting it to increase even more.

Sign up now for Global Shea 2010!

“Shea 2009 allowed Nigerians to see what was happening in Ghana and Burkina Faso and elsewhere,” said Ogunsanmi, who supports Niger State shea stakeholders through the German Development Cooperation, GTZ, and its Employment-oriented Private Sector Development Programme. “And they saw that there was some real potential in shea. When we got back from the conference, things really began to happen.”

“It was an eye-opener for us,” said Ahmed Kontagora, director general of the Niger State Commodities and Export Promotion Agency. “We are going to Mali for Global Shea 2010 in a big way so we can ensure we have gotten a market.”

Global Shea 2010 will focus on the key issues affecting shea, from the nut to the butter, the producer to the retailer.
Issues to be discussed include: Women’s Shea Butter Associations, Processors, Traders, Financial Institutions, Non-Governmental Organizations, Government, Civil Society, Exporters, Transporters, Logistics Providers, International Buyers and more.

For more information on the event please contact Global Shea
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The process for quality shea butter begins with the harvesting. The end result will be shea butter with the following characteristics

• Low FFA (Free Fatty Acids)
• Low Moisture Content
• Low impurities

Hand churning is the preferred method in this process.

The roasting of the crushed nuts serves to soften the nuts and make the next steps of oil the extraction easier. I have seen the roasting of shea nuts done in two ways. The crushed nuts are roasted in an open pan, or they are placed into a roaster as shown below.  Both ways are fine as long as there is no burning.