Empower Village
Empower Village distributes pure,
unrefined shea butter, a product made from nuts harvested from karite trees in
Burkina Faso, West Africa. Our shea nuts are harvested, processed, transported, and manufactured into shea butter by women for who traditional techniques handed down through generations. The trees and nuts are organically grown, and processed to retain the unrefined purity of our shea butter.
Our mission is to promote the healthy benefits of natural, handmade shea butter from Burkina Faso, as well as provide a fair income to the women who labor to produce it.
Our goals are to:
- Empower women and villages in Burkina Faso
- Support the tradition of shea nut harvesting, processing and manufacturing into shea butter
- Supply shea butter worldwide
The women of Burkina Faso are our experts. They are organized into cooperatives and provide all labor in creating pure, unrefined shea butter. Fair trade values are of the utmost importance to Empower Village, and thus we pay in excess of fair wages, empowering these women, while we continually seek ways to help empower their villages. In addition, Empower Village is a supporter/contributor to Regeneration Sahel, a Burkinabe women's cooperative effort that seeks to restore the environment by planting trees in the Sahel. Empower Village will give 2% of our revenue to this organization each year to help preserve biodiversity in Burkina Faso by marketing a non-timber forest product and conserving a vital resource: shea trees.
The villages of Burkina Faso are in dire need of financial security. Natural resources like shea butter may provide this poor African country with financial security. Burkina Faso's annual shea nut output may be around 850,000 tonnes (the highest worldwide), but only about 50,000 tonnes are currently harvested. Co-operative distribution like ours provides the women with quality control training, advance pay, and financial security during production. Until shea butter gained popularity, most exported shea products went to chocolate production. That market may expand due to a European Union decision to allow up to 5% non-cocoa vegetable fats in chocolate; for which shea butter is preferred as it complements cocoa very well. As well, the international cosmetic, medicinal and other industries are quickly gaining interest in shea butter, and new local markets are opening in Africa. Burkina Faso is landlocked by Mali, Niger, Benin, Togo, Ghana and the Ivory Coast.
Empower Village boasts the following infrastructure at its disposal to organize shea butter promotion: an office in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, processing, manufacturing, and storage buildings (storage for 20 tons of butter) in Ouagadougou and Sabou; land in Ouagadougou and Sabou to build production facilities; 250 acres (100 hectares) of shea nut trees, 7 semi-trucks for transportation of nuts and butter; and most importantly, partnerships with two co-operatives, in Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso, which can produce 70 tons of shea butter per year.