Barbara Crowther has a heart to heart with Akoma women's coop in Ghana

When I’m travelling, my name Barbara is very apt, because it means stranger or foreigner. On my first day in Ghana, I met another body that is truly living up to its name – the Akoma Cooperative Multipurpose Society. Akoma means heart – and this enterprising group of women have plenty of that.

Akoma specialises in the gathering and processing of organic shea nuts into butter – you can find them in Akoma’s own raw organic butter and soaps, as well as Visionary Soap Company products and Bulldog moisturiser in the UK. I’ve never seen a shea tree before – inside a green fruit (looks like a hard plum), there’s a smooth shelled nut, and inside that the kernel that produces this luscious oil and butter.

The process from nut to butter is incredibly complex –
involving parboiling the nuts before shelling, drying, crushing, roasting, milling, kneading, washing, boiling, skimming, and twice filtering before finally cooling to butter. It’s a wonder how anyone ever worked it all out. The kneading alone requires a full 45 minutes of elbow grease – it’s a proper aerobic workout, made easier if you do it in pairs. Singing really helps to keep up a steady rhythm, and a bit of dancing every now and again keeps energy levels high.  I try it, and am tired after five minutes – although my hands feel wonderfully soft for hours afterwards....

 In the last three years, the women here in the community of Puso Namogo, in the north east of Ghana, have taken what is traditionally a small scale domestic activity and turned it into an export enterprise, with both organic and Fairtrade certification. Akoma means the women have access to labour saving machinery to speed up the processing. A large basin of shelled nuts would have taken three or four hours in a mortar at home, but takes just three or four minutes to crush here using Akoma’s machine.

“We encourage each other to pack good quality nuts,” coop member Agnes Combeso tells us. For example we tell each other not to store the nuts as we sometimes used to, but parboil them early, so they don’t turn black. We encourage each other to do the right thing. Before, we would take our nuts to the market, and we often had to bring them home again because they didn't sell. Now we have a ready market and we don’t want to disappoint.” 

But it’s worth it, as the coop’s ebullient President Juliana Sampana, tells us, as the women are earning three or four times from their shea nuts than they used to. Fairtrade premiums from their first year’s sales were modest, but have enabled the coop to provide each member with free health insurance, as well as  new school uniforms for a child from each member's family. They've already bought the material to make up the uniforms..

Akoma has already expanded from 45 to 73 members but they’re reluctant to take on more members until they know there’s a bigger market for their products. There’s plenty of shea nuts around as well as lots of women wanting to join. The women of Akoma are brimming with ideas of what they could do, if they could increase their sales – buying computers and setting up a library so their children can study, wellingtons and gloves to protect them whilst harvesting the nuts, a crèche, a new health clinic and even ambitious talk of improving their kids’ access to secondary schooling. Their message to us as we prepare to leave is as heartfelt as their name – we want Akoma to grow and grow and grow - so please get more people buying our natural products.  But hey, before we go there's still time for one last dance...