Abstract

Shea nuts and shea butter represent an important source of cash for the rural female population of the Sahel. It is traditionally the women, helped by the children, who during the rainy season gather the nuts, treat them, and store them. The butter is extracted by women later in the year, when there is less work to do in the field. The government of Burkina Faso recently selected the promotion of shea butter as a priority, since it is one of the few renewable resources of the country that offers good prospect of value-added export. The government purchased 80 oil extraction presses designed in a previous IDRC-supported project (91-1029) for the extraction of shea butter.

CIDA has approved the funding of a project that will support the development of the shea butter system by improving its efficiency and increasing its contribution to the country's economy. This will be done mostly through training and diffusion of information. However, research is needed on methods for purifying the shea butter to improve the quality of the products. This project will support local researchers and their Canadian counterparts to look for novel methods of processing shea butter for quality improvement. The processes investigated will remove colour and rancidity to improve market acceptance at the national level for food consumption (as a replacement of imported oils), as well as at the international level, for the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industry.

Post-Project Summary

Researchers at the Institut de recherche en sciences appliquées et technologies (IRSAT), Ouagadougou, and POS Pilot Plant Corp., Saskatoon, took inventory of local methods of treating Shea fruit, nuts and almonds; postharvest handling of nuts and almonds; thermal treatment of nuts; and preparation of nuts and almonds for storage. They noted that churning the almond paste resulted a more acceptable product than heat-treating the almond paste. Still, butter extracted by manual pressing - and to a lesser degree, mechanical pressing - resulted in a product of inferior quality in terms of impurities, colour and smell. They examined industrial methods of de-mucilaging, neutralizing, bleaching and deodorizing the Shea butter and adapted them to conditions in Burkina Faso - in some cases by substituting locally available less expensive agents. This treatment resulted in a product acceptable either to the local or the international market.

Researchers at POS built a semi-industrial-sized pilot plant with a capacity of one tonne per day. They used this plant to refine one tonne of Shea butter and calculated the profitability of the enterprise. They determined that an investment of about 110 million CFA francs could establish a unit with a capacity of 240 tonnes per year. The analysis revealed that with production costs of over 1.5 million CFA per tonne, Shea oil could not compete with cotton, peanut, colza or palm oil on the local market. However, it could be very profitable on the international market given that the price of Shea butter was as high as 12 000 USD (over 8 million CFA) per tonne.

A number of researchers completed fieldwork for academic qualifications based on the project. Some 50 groups of women received training in postharvest handling and processing of Shea nuts. The team also explored with women's groups the idea of packaging the refined product in locally produced baskets designed for the purpose. The product was otherwise promoted at two forums, the first organized by the project team with support from UNIFEM (United Nations Development Fund for Women) in September 1999 and the second by FIRSIT (national forum for scientific research and technological innovation) in April 2000, at the Afri-Canada Open House organized by IDRC at Dakar in November 1999, and during a regional meeting on Shea processing held at Paradou in November 2000. A pamphlet used to promote Shea products is included in the final report.

Recipient Institution(s)