A GNA
Feature by D.I. Laary, GNA
GENESIS
Wa, Oct 20, GNA – Baraka Shea Butter, a
small business organisation operating in the Upper West Region, has created
sustainable income opportunities for over 400 families and women groups in
remote rural communities to improve their social and economic conditions.
In these communities, women are often the
primary breadwinners for their families and income opportunities are limited.
Baraka’s mission integrates social impact,
business value and environmental stewardship.
Significance
of Baraka
It seeks to alleviate poverty in northern
Ghana rural communities by providing income opportunities to rural women and
operating in a way that will ensure the financial sustainability of the
business.
Baraka’s work aligns with the Sustainable
Development Goals (SDG) of the United Nations and even has the SDG logo painted
on the business’s walls.
The business has worked with the women to
incorporate local technology, resources and process, keeping as close as
possible to the age-old hand-crafted shea butter making techniques that women
learnt from their mothers and grandmothers through generations.
This is in contrast to shea butter factories
that simply buy shea nuts from villages and take the rest of the value chain to
their factory, where they use chemicals and solvents to extract the shea butter
and remove the economic impact from women and communities.
Operational
areas
In order to optimise community impact and
business viability, Baraka has established two Women’s Enterprise Centres, one
in Kperisi and one in Tabiasi in the Wa Municipality.
Both are used for Shea butter activities and
then made available to the women to use for free for other farming and income
generation activities during the rest of the year.
The Kperisi centre contains machines for
shea nuts crushing, roasting, grinding, and has dedicated working areas for
whipping, finishing and packaging and storage warehouses.
This reduces the physical burden on the
women and enables the highest quality standards to meet export market
requirements.
The Tabiasi Centre contains work areas and
storage warehouses. Both centres are used year round for processing production
from farms and other income activities.
Professor Wayne Dunn, Founder of Baraka Shea
Butter, during a field visit to Kperisi processing centre, told the Ghana News
Agency, that Baraka was founded on the belief that “small business can and
should be a force for social good, environmental stewardship and a vehicle for
personal fulfilment – and that none of this is sustainable unless the business
is economically profitable at the same time.
“We created Baraka Shea Butter with one
purpose in mind. To bring pure, unrefined shea butter to the world,” he said.
“Every purchase of Baraka shea butter has a direct impact on hard-working women
and families”.
“We believe in creating value chain that
makes a difference from women who make Baraka Shea Butter all the way through
to consumers who use products made from it”.
He described the process as creating an
amazing product that impacts lives, families and communities.
The women who make Baraka Shea Butter do
everything by hand, using the age-old techniques passed down through
generations from their ancestors.
“Centuries of practice has taught them how
to extract every bit of goodness from the shea nut, and that quality is now
passed on in every package of Baraka Shea Butter and all the products made from
it,” Dunn said.
Job
Opportunities
Baraka provides direct job opportunities and
additional earnings to supplement household income of 400 families in the Wa
Municipality.
The intervention by Baraka, which in the
“Wali” dialect means “thank you”, has lifted many poor local women out of
poverty and hunger, and has also repositioned them into a more sustainable path
of income generation.
It has also boosted their health status and
wellbeing as many more women could now afford to renew their expired National
Health Insurance (NHIS) cards to access basic healthcare.
Madam Umu-Salma Ahmed, who is a member of
the Kperisi Women’s Group, said to the GNA she used to carry head pans of shea
nuts and trek long distances for grinding at high cost and after that struggled
to find market for her shea butter.
“We used to carry the nuts to faraway place
to grind them, but now we have grinding mill and roaster here with us, and
crushing machine, everything is easy for us,” she said.
Testimonies
of beneficiaries
“Before Baraka came to help us, we put the
nuts in big pots and prepare the shea butter, it was very difficult, and
sometimes we get burnt because of the open fire.
“There was no market too, we will carry to
Wa market and nobody will buy, so we carry it back home”.
Umu-Salma, who is a mother of four, also
said with income from the shea butter she is able to renew NHIS cards and
support her family with basic needs and school supplies, which hitherto was
quite difficult to do.
Madam Mariama Saaka, a mother of six
children, has been able to put three of her daughters who could not access
secondary education into learning dressmaking which she said cost her GH¢ 800.00
and she paid with ease, “thanks to Baraka,” she said.
She said she was also able to pay admission
fee of GH¢ 700.00 to get another daughter of her to learn hairdressing in one
of the prestigious saloons in the regional capital, Wa.
The booming shea butter market the local
women have established is a guaranteed market and sustained annual of income
for families.
Appeals
However, the women appealed for an expanded
market to enable them have non-stop yearly production to help rapid
transformation of the local economy and bring prosperity to rural dwellers to
meet Ghana’s quest to realise the SDGs.
President Akufo-Addo said early this year at
the 7th Tokyo international conference on African development that his
government was pursuing SDGs’ implementation with “a strong sense of urgency,
and an unparalleled commitment to act now,” which call for expanded support and
an enabling environment in rural settings to help small businesses like Baraka
Shea Butter to spread and provide vast income opportunities for rural dwellers
and women.
GNA
