Photo by Tim Wright

To the people of Ghana, shea butter is known as “women’s gold.” Used for everything from 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.

The problem these shea-nut pickers faced, says Naa-Sakle Akuete (MBA 2014), 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.

Through a family line of involvement in the shea-nut business, Akuete built Eu’Genia Shea—a for-profit B2C company that offers fair wages and provides education and retirement funds to its 7,500 registered pickers in the region. She later launched Mother’s Shea.

As they have landed in retailers like Anthropologie, Credo Beauty, and the Detox Market, with recent launches on Macys.com and in Target, the company has channeled 15 percent of the company’s profits back to the families of the shea-nut pickers with the intent that it be used for the education of their children, or—for women without children or with children who have aged out of school—retirement funds.

Offering fair prices—a 20 percent premium—and educational and retirement benefits is not good just for the workers and their families, says Akuete. It’s also ideal for her brands. By keeping the processing and manufacturing in Ghana, where the companies have 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 of the elements that give shea butter it’s gold status in Africa.

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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