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Just Shea
ABOUT US
Just Shea is a social business created to increase the leverage, income and safety of the 600,000 women in Ghana who participate in the global shea trade.
The Just Shea Program is augmenting the health and economy of the women shea harvesters of Ghana with a multi-pronged approach including: providing safety gear to groups of women harvesters as a loan repaid in shea nuts, to protect them from ubiquitous snakes, and the establishment of cooperative silos to increase the price per kilo paid to the harvesters.
The Just Shea Program is funded in part by sales from our line of luxury skincare products made with safely harvested, equitably traded shea butter, created expressly for this purpose.
All of our net profits are channeled through our non-profit (www.ovp-wdi.org) to provide snake bite protection, improved equipment and infrastructure, and, in turn, increased economic return, for the women who harvest and process Just Shea.
WHAT WE DO
We are dedicated to empowering women in Ghana working in the shea sector. We believe that increasing the capacity for these women to safely earn more income is the most direct way to improve their lives, and those of their families.
We focus on women because when women earn income, they reinvest 90 percent of it into their families. We focus on women because the majority of the women we work with are illiterate and their ability to earn more income determines whether their daughters escape becoming part of the world’s 91 million out-of-school girls.
Our Approach
Our approach to halting this cycle of poverty-induced illiteracy is scalable, replicable and has its locus in the grass roots. We seek to develop, test, prove, and popularize models that significantly increase the income of poor, rural women and catalyze a cascading positive effect throughout their communities.
Just Shea Program is augmenting the health and economy of women shea collectors from the village up.
We literally save lives by providing access to protective-gear for sheanut collectors, who are extremely vulnerable to snakes and scorpions, which increases their efficiency and harvest size, and build collective warehouses for the women to aggregate a high-quality crop, so they can earn a higher price. We also offer access to finance, market links, and capacity-building trainings as we believe that solutions to the problems of access must be self-sustaining in order to succeed.
Just Shea paves wider avenues for the women of Ghana: real leverage in the multi-million dollar shea industry and a socio-economic model that may be extended throughout a disenfranchised population of millions of women in Sub-Saharan Africa.
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