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.
thanks for your interest.
Could you pls. provide me your contact details.
Thanks.
Isabel
You can reach me at kaushiklingam@hotmail.com
I checked out the video. Count me in for this..
Regards,
Koushik Lingam
these are fantastic pictures. Thanks a lot. One can now imagine much better what it is like to work with shea, local MFIs and technology.
Regards
Heino