In Africa, shea butter is sometimes known as “women’s gold.” Used for everything from skin care to stretch marks to diaper rash, it’s a go-to product in high demand. And it offers employment opportunities for women willing to survey shea-nut trees across the wilds of sub-Saharan Africa, picking the nuts and selling them. “It can take up to 25 years for a tree to reach maturation,” says Naa-Sakle Akuete (MBA 2014), “but once it does reach its gestational period, it can bear fruit for hundreds of years. So it takes a while to get there, but afterward they’re really strong, hardy trees that are the foundations of these communities.”

The problem these shea-nut pickers faced, says Akuete, CEO and founder of Eu’Genia Shea and its Target-based sister brand, Mother’s Shea, is that they are largely women in villages without electricity and therefore lack access to knowledge of the broader value of their harvest or the ability to move their product beyond Africa to be marketed and sold. The result? They take what they could get from the traders who showed up in the village with trucks from time to time.

It is a problem Akuete and her family had long sought to address. Her grandmother was a midwife who turned to shea butter to help treat women and infants in her practice. Her mother, Eugenia, built shea-butter cooperatives and strengthened existing organizations; became president of the Global Shea Alliance; sat on the Ghanaian president’s National Shea Steering Committee; and started a B2B company that supplied bulk shea butter to brands and distributors.

Akuete initially started down a different career path, having taken a job at JPMorgan Chase after business school. But when her mother became ill in 2015, Akuete left her job as an analyst on Wall Street, incorporated her mother’s B2B business, and built Eu’Genia Shea and Mother’s Shea—B2C, for-profit shea-butter brands.

Akuete’s brands maintained her mother’s original mission of improving the lives of shea-nut pickers in Ghana. “My mom—on a very, very casual level—had been supporting individual nut pickers and their families,” says Akuete. “So there were a few children of her workers for whom she would buy computers or pay tuition. But it wasn’t really codified in any way, and there was no commitment to it at a broader level. My stepping in just made it official practice.”

The 7,500 registered shea-nut pickers who work with Mother’s Shea and Eu’Genia are paid a 20 percent premium for their nuts, and 15 percent of company profits are channeled back to the families of the shea-nut pickers to help cover educational costs. For the women without children or with children who have aged out of school, the funds filter into their retirement. “One thing that my family drilled into me at a super-young age was the importance of education,” says Akuete. She was lucky, she notes, having won the “geographic lottery” simply by being born in the States after her family emigrated during a military coup in Ghana during the 1970s. She wanted to give families in these villages the same educational opportunities she had enjoyed in America.

Offering fair prices, as well as educational and retirement benefits, to her shea-nut pickers in West Africa is not just good for the women and their families; it’s also ideal for Akuete’s companies. By keeping the processing and manufacturing in Ghana, where the company has two facilities, Akuete can guarantee unrefined shea butter without added chemicals, agents, synthetic processes, and transcontinental shipments that strip the butter of its natural qualities—all the elements that give shea butter its gold status in Africa. “The next time you’re at the grocery store or a beauty store, flip over one of the containers that says ‘shea butter’ on the front,” says Akuete. “A lot of products will have a picture of a shea nut and leaf, and the words shea butter in huge font on the front. But the actual shea-butter content can be less than 10 percent—in some cases less than one percent—relative to 64 percent for Mother’s Shea and more than 80 percent for Eu’Genia.”

Consumers and retailers have noted the difference—sales more than doubled in Eu’Genia’s first year, and the brand has landed in retailers like Anthropologie, Credo Beauty, and the Detox Market, with recent launches on Macys.com and in Target.

But more important, she says, is the win-win of a for-profit company with social impact: building a burgeoning business whose growth supports the women who make it all possible.

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