TAMALE NGO SUPPORTS SHEA-BUTTER INDUSTRY (Page 17)

Story: Zakaria Alhassan, Tamale

THE shea-butter industry is the main stay of majority of unemployed youth in the northern region, particularly women.
The fascinating thing about the nut is that the shea-nut tree grows in the wild in the area. This therefore makes it easy for the women, especially those in the rural areas, to pick the nuts for processing to earn some income.
This is, however, not without its own challenges as the poor women spend most part of the day in the bush thus exposing themselves to the dangers of snakebites and other threats to their lives without fair prices for the product to commensurate their hard work.
Prices are dictated by representatives of foreign companies who take advantage of the ignorance of the people and the lack of available market for the product in the area to purchase it at cheap prices for export.
Some of the shea-nut is also processed into edible oil and body creme for local use. Unfortunately, the women have not got the capacity to make their finished products attractive to their consumers.
It was for this reason that a Tamale-based non-governmental organisation (NGO), Enterprising Women in Development, organised a five-day training workshop to equip some selected women at Fooshegu, a Tamale suburb, with improved technology on shea-butter extraction and soap making.
The women, who were drawn from three groups, were also offered training on packaging and adding value to the product to make it more attractive to clients.
They were taken through various stages of shea-butter processing from the picking stage to the finished product and environmental sanitation.
At the close of the training, the participants were offered some materials to enable them to set up their own businesses.
The Executive Director of the organisation, Hajia Azara Telly, explained that her outfit decided to focus on the development of women because they were among the marginalised in society.
According to her, since women were the bedrock of the home, any support offered them would eventually benefit the entire family including children.
‘‘Our aim is to help empower the women with the necessary skills to improve on their finances to enable them to take good care of their families in order that the children would become responsible in future to contribute meaningfully to the development of their respective communities and the nation,’’ she intimated.
Hajia Telly entreated the participants not only to form co-operative groups but to make such bodies viable to make it possible for them to access assistance from banks and other financial institutions to derive maximum benefits from their trade.
She equally appealed to men to support their wives and daughters in their various choices of trade, professions and education, quoting the celebrated Ghanaian educationist, Kwegir Aggrey that, ‘‘If you educate a woman, you educate a nation, and if you educate a man, you educate an individual.’’