Sahara Botanicals would work with refugee women and the local population in southern Chad to improve economic empowerment and education through shea butter production. 

Summary

Sahara Botanicals will establish the first commercial shea-producing orchard in the world in Goré, Chad. Members of the local and refugee populations will serve as cultivators and processors. The shea butter will be processed and packaged in Chad. International staff will oversee local production workers. The final product will be retailed in 4 oz and 8 oz jars on shelves at existing retail outlets for body care products in the US.

The town of Goré, Chad is home to more than 24,000 refugees from the Central African Republic. These refugees, largely women, are left with few economic prospects in their new country and the added population also strains the host community. Establishing a shea- producing orchard and production facility will provide both refugees and local community with incomes and mitigate tension between the two groups. Our focus on training, education and transition to local management contributes to sustainability.

The population increase from the new arrival of refugees has put strain on the environment of Goré. Sahara Botanicals is committed to environmentally sustainable practices and will utilize solar energy to run its production facility. The orchard will plant over 8,000 trees that create oxygen and help purify the air. Ultimately, shea butter provides an all-natural alternative to chemically based moisturizers, which will reduce the demand for them.

Opportunity

Sahara Botanicals proposes to plant a 40-hectare, 8,160-tree orchard of vitellaria paradoxa karité trees. Due to unique climatic conditions, karité trees grow only in a small band in West and Central Africa. The West African species is vitellaria paradoxa and the East African species is vitellaria nilotica. Newly planted karité trees typically take between 20-25 years to produce the fruit from which the butter is produced. Once they reach maturity karité trees will produce fruit an average of once every three years. If all the fruit from a tree is processed it will produce an average of 2.5 pounds of shea butter. Due to the long propagation time for karité trees of 20-25 years, no orchards have been established and women must walk long distances to collect the fruit from wild trees. This often results in collection delays and spoiled fruit, which can directly lower the quality of shea butter produced.

Shea butter is a plant oil extracted from the nut of the karité tree. Shea butter has been used for centuries in Africa both for cooking and topical skin care. At room temperature, shea butter is an off-white creamy solid and melts between 86^o – 95^o F making it ideal for being absorbed at skin temperature. In addition, shea butter has two important components for skin care, known colloquially as the moisturizing and healing fractions. While other all-natural oils and substances have similar moisturizing components, shea butter is unique for its particularly high percentage of healing fraction, particularly in the West African variety. Shea butter contains high levels of Vitamins A and E, cinnamic acid, lupeol, beta-amyrin, and triterpenes. As such, it has a variety of different uses as a cosmetic. Shea butter production in Chad up to this point has been done in small quantities for local consumption. Low quality standards mean that international markets are not currently interested in shea production in Chad and the majority of international sales come from Ghana or Burkina Faso.

Quantity

A new propagation technique being utilized by agricultural specialists on the ground in Goré shortens the time it takes for a tree to mature and bear fruit from 20-25 years to 5-7 years. Using the new propagation technique currently being implemented in the refugee camps of Goré, the Sahara Botanicals shea orchard solves this problem by increasing the volume of shea butter produced. This happens because the same propagation technique allows you to reproduce only high-yield trees, which increases the average productivity per tree. Increasing the volume of shea butter produced also makes using modern processing equipment cost-effective. This new equipment in turn increases the quality of shea butter produced, which means it can be sold at a higher price point. The comparative financial advantage over other shea butter producers who rely on wild- Traditionally shea butter producers have been more limited in their business plans.

Quality

In addition to struggling to find consistency of quantity shea butter, retailers worldwide have struggled to obtain consistent quality shea butter. Producing shea butter using traditional methods is a long and labor-intensive process. Small improvements to the production process, including regulating cooking temperature and using clean water will also dramatically improve the quality of shea butter produced. Sahara Botanicals’ staff in charge of overseeing production has been certified as a shea technician by the American Shea Butter Institute, the same institution which grades imported shea butter on an A-F scale based on the purity and the size of the healing fraction. Operating a karité orchard also ensures that fruit will be rapidly collected and reduces the likelihood that rotten fruit will contaminate whole batches of shea butter. By implementing these techniques, Sahara Botanicals will be able to provide our customers with a consistent and high-quality product previously unavailable from any current shea butter producer.

Social Impact

Opportunity

Though there is a large international market for shea butter, typically only 10% percent of nuts intended for global markets are processed into shea butter locally; most of the remaining 90% is processed at facilities in Europe.  Although African women are already trained in processing shea butter, it is their European counterparts who benefit from those jobs. Additionally, most of the 10% of nuts that do get processed into shea butter in Africa are shipped in bulk wholesale to distributors in Europe and the United States. This limits the financial benefits to the African producers of shea butter.

The town of Goré, located approximately 30 km from the border with the Central African Republic, is home to two camps of refugees from the CAR that collectively house more than 24,000 refugees. The addition of tens of thousands of people to an already under-developed area of Chad has caused serious strain on the local government, economy and environment, which has caused tension between the refugees and the local population. Many women arrive in Chad unaccompanied by a husband and have little means to support their families. Simultaneously international aid to fund the refugee camp operations in southern Chad has been steadily decreasing and the UNHCR has stopped fully subsidizing most of the refugee camp populations. By establishing a viable export business, Sahara Botanicals ensures that the social and economic development of the community will continue even after UNHCR has discontinued relief operations in Goré. Social progress is targeted in several sectors.

Income Generation

Sahara Botanicals is committed to maximizing the benefits to the local population. We seek to minimize the number of international staff and maximize the number of local staff. The operations itself will create 35 permanent jobs, primarily for unaccompanied women with dependents who would not typically have access to legitimate or profitable employment. This gender focus is possible because shea butter production is typically done by women and will not conflict with widely established gender roles. Shea butter has been produced by African women for centuries to be used for cooking and topical skin and hair care.  As an income generation activity, is empowers women by allowing them to contribute financially to their families or support their families single-handedly if necessary. By strengthening the capacity of existing processing facilities operated by women, Sahara Botanicals be able to mitigate gender-based violence.

Conflict Mitigation

In addition to providing sustainable livelihoods for the vulnerable populations, Sahara Botanicals shea butter production facility will help mitigate potential conflict between the local community and the refugee population. Sahara Botanicals will seek to employ equal percentages of each population. Increasing interaction between the two groups will help foster understanding and reduce tension between the two groups.

Training

Another key goal of Sahara Botanicals is to transition management to local population. The incubation period as a non-profit allows Sahara Botanicals to invest in the human capital of its employees by sponsoring literacy, production and business training. These trainings will help prepare persons who would typically not bee seen as able to sustain a business for their role in contributing to the larger structure of the Sahara Botanicals enterprise. Even if employees decide to discontinue working for Sahara Botanicals, they can transfer their newly acquired skills to other endeavors and community members, thereby broadening the positive effect that we will have on the community.

Education

To broaden the social impact that Sahara Botanicals has on the community we will also require that employees of Sahara Botanicals have enrolled all of their children in schools. In the case of the refugees, school fees have already been paid for by UNHCR. In the case of the local population, Sahara Botanicals will pay the school fees of all employees’ children who are enrolled in and attending school.

Environmental Impact

Opportunity

The influx of refugees to southern Chad has placed great strain on the environment. Given increased strain on the land, development through traditional subsistence farming techniques currently being utilized will not be sustainable. Although Sahara Botanicals is not specifically designed to improve environmental our enterprise in Chad is designed to prevent environmental degradation in several ways.

Reduced Pollution

Creating a profitable business from a renewable agricultural resource reserves land from being used for industrial or residential development. In addition to preventing erosion and desertification, planting karité trees will help to neutralize greenhouse gases. Using labor-intensive practices instead of capital-intensive ones not only creates more jobs for the local population, but also reduces the dependence of machines, which will cause more pollution.

Multi-use Land

Shea butter-producing karité trees are more productive when animals graze underneath them allowing for multipurpose land use and increasing the financial productivity of land already in use. Karité trees have also been shown to prevent desertification. To prevent further environmental degradation, Sahara Botanicals will use only organic processes in cultivation, there by maintaining a clean water supply for the surrounding community.

Energy Needs

Although establishing a production facility in Goré will create energy needs not present before, Sahara Botanicals is committed to using solar generators to power our irrigation and production facilities. In remote African contexts, solar energy has proven to be a more reliable and economic alternative to gasoline generators. In addition, solar generators are typically easier to maintain than their non-renewable counterparts. Using the abundant solar energy of Chad will allow Sahara Botanicals to minimize our carbon emissions footprint.

Product Substitution

Ultimately shea butter provides an all-natural alternative to chemically based moisturizers whose production practices harm the environment. Giving end consumers a socially and environmentally sustainable alternative to those products will reduce demand in the US and Europe and reduce the harmful environmental practices of their manufacturers.