The Savannah Fruits Company

Savannah Fruits produces quality, handcrafted shea butter, working with rural African women in local co-operatives to provide a year round income and a valuable alternative to poaching and timber harvesting in conservation areas. 

 The post-harvest processing of shea nut has been done by female workers in their homes. However, this often leads to inefficiencies and also impacts the local environment and health of the communities.  

 Shea Innovates aims to implement a new, centralised post-harvest method alongside a fully integrated and digitised traceability system throughout the women-run shea nut cooperatives. The new approach to shea nut butter processing builds on an old tradition of handcrafted shea processing while adding 20,000 safer job opportunities to local communities. 

 TRANSFORM is supporting Savannah Fruit to undertake an impact assessment of the new co-operative approach, digitise the co-operatives integrating blockchain traceability, achieve carbon accreditation of the co-operatives and explore new revenue streams for women through carbon credits. Together the aim is to centralise the processing of shea nuts in co-operatives so as to reduce overall water use, carbon emissions and deforestation from wood as fuel. The initiative also aims to help professionalise the sector.