Shea Project – Impressions from the field

Shea Project – Impressions from the field

In this blog, I would like to take on a tour around shea project communities, which are targeted by Shea Project. 

The pictures were taken during my last onsite activities on the ground in Ghana.

The Shea trees

Shea trees are wild or semi-wild trees and are found in the bush or in farms. 

During the shea nut season (late April-early July), women leave to the bush at dawn to go and pick the nuts: first arrived, first served!

The Shea Woman 

          Woman with her shea butter. 

          She sells one “portion” 

          of shea butter for about GHS 10c, EUR 5c

Shea Women are located in small rural geographical settlements which are quite distant from each other.

They are largely non literate women who engage in shea nut and butter processing as part of the livelihood and income generating activities within their communities.

The solidarity groups

      Maxwell (one of our Ghanian resource) interviewing the 

     groups of women to listen to their needs

These women are organized into groups of between 10 and 30 members

by the MFIs (Microfinance Institutes) to enable them access to credit.

Some groups have members who are quite literate, while other members have access to and make use of mobile phones.

The MFIs Offices

               Service point office of Maata-N-Tudu, one of the partners’ MFI 

Our partner non-profit MFIs have service points/offices that are centrally located in the district to provide

financial and non-financial services to their clients at the lowest cost possible.

But bad roads and dispersed clients makes it a challenge to deliver those services in remote areas keeping transaction costs at a financially sustainable level.

For the project deliverables of Shea Project, this is the place where Simple Loan Tracking System will be running. If you are interested to support us in developing software to be used in this challenging enviornment pls. get in contact via comment section.