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Burkina Faso Shea Butter Producers Go High Tech

By Ramata Soré

May 15, 2008 — IDG News Service —

Awa Sawadogo, who works for the Songtaaba Yalgré Association shea-butter trade group in Burkina Faso, never went to school. But she is a key member of the group, learning and using technology to produce a newsletter on association activities and the production of "bio" shea butter, which, thanks to the Internet, is becoming an important, money-generating export for women in rural villages in the country.

"My God! Ten years ago, I wouldn't have ever guessed that I would be writing, using a computer to produce a newspaper," she says proudly, answering questions in Moré, a local language. "But now, I can write in Moré, my mother tongue. I know how to create a folder, a file..."

Sawadogo is in charge of the Moré version of the trade group's newspaper. "For us women from rural areas, ICT tools mean learning and opening up to the world," she says.

Songtaaba Yalgré is an association of shea butter producers -- the vast majority of whom are rural women. Shea butter is a natural fat extracted from shea (also known as karite) tree fruit -- a plummy pulp that surrounds a large seed, or nut. Shea butter is extracted from the nuts and used in beauty products. The butter also can be edible.

The driving force behind Songtaaba Yalgré's Web site, created in 2004, is to give the 3,100 women associated with the group visibility, according to Noélie Ndembé, the head of MIPROKA (Maison pour l’Information et la Promotion du Karité, or the Shea Information and Promotion House), an affiliated project initiated to help train and inform shea producers.

"To be on the Net is to be seen everywhere in the world," Ndembé says. And that leads to clients.

The association sells most of what it produces through the Web site.

"In the past, we produced, but had some problems sell[ing] to the world. Now, 90 percent of our products are ordered via the Internet," Ndembé says.

Since 2002, Songtaaba Yalgré has offered products bearing the Bio-Ecocert and Bio NOP labels, which guarantee 100 percent natural products. The group exports items to Europe, Canada and the U.S.

To produce quality products, Songtaaba Yalgré members use GPS technology to calculate and track the location, surface area and the number of trees on fields, explains Marguerite Simporé, a GPS technology teacher at Songtaaba Yalgré who was trained by a European expert.

Using the GPS technology, women track field data and collect the shea butter fruit that has fallen to the ground. After that, they fill out a form where they identify each fruit and its tree.

 

 

 

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