From Africa Recovery, Vol.15 #4, December 2001, page 6

Making trade work for poor women

Villagers in Burkina Faso discover an opening in the global market

By Ernest Harsch

They call it "women's gold." When crushed and processed, the nuts of the shea tree yield a vegetable fat known as shea butter. It has long been a common ingredient in local foods and soap, but its qualities also make it a valuable export, for use in the manufacture of chocolate and cosmetics. The tree grows throughout the semi-arid Sahel region of West Africa, but the largest concentration is in Burkina Faso, where exports of shea butter and unprocessed shea kernels brought in CFA5 bn ($7 mn) in 2000, making it the country's third most important export, after cotton and livestock.

The harvesting and processing of shea is primarily an activity of rural women, between 300,000 and 400,000 in Burkina alone. So its earnings directly benefit some of the poorest villagers, in a country classified as one of the poorest in the world.

Not many other developing-country exports can make a similar claim. Even when their prices are not depressed in world markets, coffee, cocoa, cotton, copper and other primary commodity exports yield benefits mainly to governments, corporations and middlemen, along with some producers -- most of whom are men and few of whom are among the very poor.

Visiting shea butter projects in Burkina in February 2001, Ms. Noleen Heyzer, executive director of the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), emphasized the importance of consciously trying to counter global trade's inclination to further marginalize the poor. "Our support for shea butter producers," she told local reporters, "reflects our determination to increase women's access to the world market and to reverse the prevailing tendencies of globalization, in order to make it work for women and the poor."

A neglected treasure

Shea -- known in the local Dioula language as karité ("life") -- generally grows wild, with little need for any special cultivation or nourishment. Almost all parts of the tree have some practical use. The bark is an ingredient in traditional medicines against certain childhood ailments and minor scrapes and cuts. The shell of the nuts can repel mosquitoes. Above all, the fruity part of the nut, when crushed, yields a vegetable oil that can be used in cooking, soap-making and skin and hair care. Harvesting the nuts and making the butter have traditionally been women's work. Men usually are involved only in transport and marketing.

Photo: ©International Development Research Centre

Unprocessed shea nuts have been exported to Europe for decades, primarily for the manufacture of chocolate in Switzerland and the UK. During the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, Burkina's earnings from shea exports came in second, after cotton. But the world price for shea nuts plunged in 1986-87, and the quality of Burkina's output declined as well, bringing a reduction in its share of the world market. By 1990, Burkina was exporting only 22,000 tonnes, just a tiny fraction of the shea nuts grown each year.

The government's adoption of structural adjustment policies in the early 1990s further disrupted the harvesting of the nuts and the marketing of shea products. Liberalization of agricultural marketing, through elimination of the price stabilization board, brought considerable instability to domestic trade and left the sector as a whole poorly organized.

Theoretically, the devaluation of the CFA franc in 1994 might have made it possible for local producers of shea nuts and butter to earn more from exports. But Burkinabè women were in an especially weak position to take advantage of any new economic opportunities. An estimated 88 per cent of rural women are illiterate, and have limited technical skills to improve the quality of their butter or acquire information about market trends. Even when they do have the skills or knowledge, few women have access to formal credit to purchase shea butter presses or to better promote their products.

Burkina's structural adjustment programme placed a heavy emphasis on exports, but throughout the 1990s the main focus was on cotton. With support from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), major investments were made in reorganizing the sector and providing new seed varieties and other support services. Producer prices for cotton were raised and cotton farmers received credit to purchase fertilizer and pesticides. As a result, cotton production mounted, from 117,000 tonnes in the 1993/94 season, to a projected 400,000 tonnes in 2001/02.

The benefits of cotton -- Burkina's "white gold" -- are not negligible. The crop bolsters the overall trade balance and provides livelihoods directly to about 2 million of the country's 11 million people. But cotton also brings some costs. When world prices are low, as they currently are, the government may actually take a financial loss by trying to maintain a producer price that is attractive to farmers. The chemical fertilizers and pesticides used in cotton's cultivation tend to damage the soil. And the expansion of land area devoted to cotton sometimes comes at the expense of cereals, further undermining food security in a country of periodic drought and hunger.

In Burkina's cotton-growing zones, according to numerous field studies, social and economic inequalities also have tended to widen. Since the very poor do not have access to much land or credit for inputs, successful cotton farmers often come from the better-off layers of rural society. And hardly any of them are women.

NGOs and donors take an interest

In 1994, as living conditions worsened for many Burkinabè under the impact of structural adjustment and devaluation, the government announced "six commitments" to help the poor and ensure environmental sustainability. One of the commitments specifically highlighted the potential for promoting women's economic empowerment through development of the shea sector.

In response to government appeals for assistance, a number of external non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and bilateral donors began to support various projects. One of the first initiatives was the Projet national karité (PNK, National Shea Project), launched in 1995 with financial and technical assistance from the Centre canadien d'étude et de coopération internationale (CECI), a Canadian NGO. Then Taiwan came in with major funding, about CFA1 bn ($1.4 mn) up to the end of 1999.

UNIFEM's West Africa regional office, headquartered in Dakar, Senegal, sent a mission to Burkina at the government's request. It found that despite the PNK and other shea projects, women still did not have secure access to means of production. So in 1997 UNIFEM became directly involved, specifically to help women's groups bolster their ability to produce shea butter and to link them up with potential export markets.

Because of the proliferation of shea projects, the government decided the following year to establish a coordinating committee to ensure that the different donor institutions did not operate at cross-purposes or duplicate efforts. The committee enjoys a high political profile, functioning directly under the authority of Ms. Gisèle Guigma, the minister of women's advancement.

Exploring new markets

UNIFEM researchers confirmed that for women producers, the greatest potential income lies in the production and marketing of shea butter, rather than the raw nuts. In 1997, a tonne of unprocessed shea nuts sold domestically for CFA70,000 and externally for CFA100,000. But the same tonne, when processed into shea butter, fetched CFA148,000.

Several foreign cosmetics firms already have begun to use shea butter in their lotions, creams, soaps and other products, including L'Oreal and the Body Shop. UNIFEM helped broker a particularly important deal with L'Occitane, a French cosmetics company. Unlike most firms, L'Occitane does not use intermediaries, but buys its shea butter directly from the Union des groupements Kiswendsida (UGK), a network of more than 100 shea groups. This ensures that a greater share of the revenue goes to the producers, instead of middlemen. In 2001, L'Occitane contracted for 60 tonnes of shea butter, and will likely increase the amount to 90 tonnes in 2002. In addition, it provides the women with training in quality control and pays for the shea butter in advance, giving them greater economic security during the production phase.

"It is important for women to have a partner like L'Occitane," says Ms. Félicité Yaméogo, president of the UGK, "because it is they who enable us to sell our products at a higher price." Earning regular incomes, she observes, "helps these women producers earn the respect of their family and the right to speak out in the community."

Until such cosmetics companies took an interest, most exported shea nuts or butter went into the manufacture of chocolates. That market may expand considerably in the near future, following the European Union's decision in 2000 to allow up to 5 per cent of non-cocoa vegetable fats in chocolate manufacturing. Despite its cost, shea butter is particularly favoured because it complements cocoa very well.

According to Ms. Antoinette Ouédraogo, a shea producers' representative, the women's groups can also conquer new markets closer to home, within Burkina and in neighbouring countries. She notes that Burkina's annual shea nut output may be around 850,000 tonnes (the highest anywhere in the world), but only some 50,000 tonnes are currently being harvested.

Skills and sustainability

"Linking women producers to global markets of shea butter is one way to strengthen and build women's economic security," notes Ms. Heyzer. Their economic position is enhanced not only through the additional income they earn, but also through the technical skills and organizational capacities they acquire.

All assistance to the women flows through their own local associations. As of November 2000, there were estimated to be more than 1,300 women shea producers' organizations, covering about half the country's provinces. In some areas, a very sizeable proportion of women belong to such groups -- in Sissili, for example, fully one-third of rural women are now engaged in shea production.

Through these producers' groups, women are able to pool their resources to purchase simple presses, greatly reducing the amount of time and labour required to crush the shea nuts. They receive technical training to achieve the standards of quality for shea butter required by foreign buyers, and are able to make marketing contacts through periodic trade fairs.

According to Ms. Fati Bougouma, head of the PNK project, women participating in the shea groups also attend literacy classes, especially in Mooré and Dioula, two of the most widely spoken indigenous languages. This has made it possible to train some of the women to themselves train other shea producers. "With literacy," she says, "women are able to manage better, they understand more."

Along with practical instruction, the various shea projects also seek to educate the general public about environmental sustainability. The shea tree is a protected species. It is illegal to even pick unripened nuts (mature nuts fall to the ground). But the scarcity of other cheap sources of energy often leads to abusive cutting of the trees for firewood, while farmers sometimes burn them to clear land for farming.

The shea tree flourishes best in the wild, and is not easily cultivated. Generally, planted seedlings, even if they grow into trees, tend not to produce usable nuts. However, Mali has had some success in replanting certain varieties of shea trees on a wide scale, and an experimental shea plantation has been started in Burkina, near the town of Nongremassom, with some initially encouraging results.

The most immediate challenge, though, is to protect the existing trees. Says Ms. Bougouma, "Every day, we explain to the people that the shea tree is one of our country's greatest riches."

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