By Philip Tengzu
Jefisi, (UW/R), June 26, GNA – Green World Initiative (GWI) and Fuji Oil Ghana Limited have built ties with women cooperatives in Jefisi and Kunkorgu communities in the Sissala West District with the handing over of a warehouse for each cooperative.
The two warehouses, which brought to a total of six warehouses the organisations have constructed for communities in the region, were for the cooperatives to harvest, process and store sheanuts to be sold to Fuji Oil for industrial use.
The groups could also store their farm produces and the produce of other people in the community at a fee to serve as a source of revenue for the cooperatives.
Addressing a gathering of people at Jefisi to commission the warehouse on the theme “The man can do”, Mr Ronny Voorspools, the Managing Director of Fuji Oil Ghana Ltd, said the initiative was to create a link between the industry and the sheanut aggregators in the communities.
He said individual women could not have that direct link to companies to sell their shea nut except through middlemen who offered them low prices.
He said that informed the need to group them into cooperatives, train and empower them to improve on their sheanut business by processing good quality sheanut for uptake by the company.
Mr Voorspools explained that the company would relatively better prices than the market price of the products to improve the livelihoods of women in the area.
“This will allow them to not sell their produce early in the season but keep the nuts until the quality has reached the top level and they need to get the highest price in the market”, he said.
He said Fuji Oil had come to stay and would work with the women cooperatives to alleviate their poverty through the sheanut enterprise.
Mr Voorspools expressed their commitment to promoting environmental sustainability practices by planting economic trees with the cooperatives they worked with.
Mr Wisdom Doe, the Managing Director of GWI, the local implementer for Fuji Oil Ghana Ltd, said the members of the cooperatives had been supported with refinancing through Fuji Oil to aggregate the sheanuts.
He said the women had been provided with capacity building and cooperative management to enable them to run the cooperatives successfully.
“The warehouse is to serve the purpose of resolving the challenge of storage that the women have in the shea value chain.
Before this warehouse women pick nuts, process and sell them at the beginning of the season where they sell it cheaply to middlemen who then store it and later sell at higher prices”, he explained.
He said the cooperatives had also received tricycles to enable them to cart the sheanut from the field to the warehouse for processing storage.
The intervention had so far reached 8,400 women with plans advanced to extend it to other parts of the region
Mr Doe said the communities in which they operated would also benefit from the “Shea for Life” project of Fuji Oil which guaranteed the communities of some social interventions through the sheanuts they supplied to the company.
Madam Sappa Suoliha, a member of the cooperative, said due to the lack of a storage facility for their sheanuts, they used to sell them off as soon as they harvested them at low prices and thanked GWI and Fuji Oil for the intervention.
GNA