Shea trees are growing in all areas of dry savanna in northern and upper regions of Ghana. Throughout this broad range, people in the village traditionally harvested cyanut, extracted the butter as a body cream or to make soap. Despite her practicality, she is told that it will take 60 years for fruit to bear fruit, so it has never grown up in plantations. This fact may help prevent women in the village producing shea butter from losing control of the trade against the ongoing efforts to industrialize the production process.
Technical consultancy center (TCC) of Kwame Nkrumah University of Technology and Technology (KNUST) of Ghana Kumashi made it was required to replace coconut oil with soap in the mid 1970's. At that time, the available palm oil was not enough to meet the local demand of soap. Peter Donkor, an officer in charge of the project, was experimenting with a wide range of choices including castor oil, physical nut oil, second grade cocoa butter, coconut oil, and neem oil.
Traditional soap was called "Amonkye samina". It was made from shea butter using rye extracted from ashes of baked cocoa shells. So soft potassium soap made in this way is said to be skin friendly. This type of soap is sold in western countries in the form of liquid as a special cosmetic, but in Ghana it did not meet the need for general purpose laundry soap in the 1970s. Although hard soap could be manufactured using shea butter, TCC did not succeed in obtaining sufficient supply quantity to maintain production at the soap pilot factory in Kwamo Village.
The key point of the supply problem was the very slow nature of the traditional shea butter extraction process. Peter Donkor warned the scientists in the chemistry biochemistry department the need to find a faster extraction method and several experiments were conducted but nothing of practical value appeared. This problem had rested for nearly a decade before Solomon Adjorlolo of SIS Engineering Ltd was interested in this issue.
For many years, SIS has manufactured and sold a small machinery factory to grind corn, produce gullies from cassava, and extract coconut oil. Solomon Adjorlolo remodeled some of his established machines and designed at least one new machine to look for opportunities to make a prototype shea butter factory and test it. Through the TCC, the prototype plant was transferred from Kumasi to the Intermediate Technology Transfer Unit (ITTU) in the northern Tamale, which is rich in shear trees. The test was successful. Mechanized plants can produce far more butter in a day than village women's team can produce in the old way in a week.
It now encompasses the danger of gender shift. In Ghana and other areas, as industries of traditional villages are mechanized and the routine troubles are resolved, it is often seen that the industry is handled by women and operated by male entrepreneurs It was done. Therefore, Tamale ITTU confirmed that the SIS plant remains in the test village, and made consideration for the woman who cooperated in the examination. Later, when the German aid agency GTZ funded the four shea butter factories, they were also allocated to an established female group with years of experience in shea butter production.
It was around this time that BBC came to Ghana and tried to make a movie with a famous British businessman Anita Roddick who created a hairdresser 's Body Shop chain. The theme of this movie is that female entrepreneurs pioneered new business activities and the BBC contacted the TCC to identify such people in Ghana. Anita Roddick met with the producers of butter in the north and was very impressed with the quality of the product as well as the company.
The first ordering of her butter placed by the body shop was to use 4 tons for experimental purposes. Although this problem gradually advanced, in the early 1990's the Fair Trade Agreement was negotiated with the long-time exporter Wonoo Ventures Ltd. Within a few years the annual export of shea butter to the body shop exceeds 100 tons, the profits of which have been returned to female producers and their village development funds. That means that it may take 60 years to establish a productive share, tree plantation for supplying to a large central extraction factory, which should remain for many years.
