Ghana’s Shea Women Win Equator Prize

The Sunkpa Shea Women’s Cooperative, an indigenous women’s group in Ghana’s Savannah Region, has been named a 2022 winner of the enviable Equator Prize Award. The women’s group is among nine other winners selected from a pool of over 500 nominations from 109 countries.

Organized by the Equator Initiative within the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Equator Prize is awarded biennially to recognize outstanding community efforts to reduce poverty through the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.

This stride by the Sunkpa women should be applauded as a big win for local communities in Ghana as the award highlights the importance of indigenous people as defenders of a country’s natural resources as well as the crucial role played in conservation of the environment.

As a winner, the shea women will receive US$10,000 and the opportunity to take part in a series of special virtual events associated with the UN General Assembly, the UNDP Nature for Life Hub, the UN climate convention’s COP 27 in Egypt, and the Convention on Biological Diversity’s COP 15 in Montreal.

Other winners are from Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Gabon, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Mozambique and Argentina.

Four of this year’s Equator Prize winners including the Sunkpa Women are women-led initiatives, all ten are promoting gender equality in their community, and all showcase the importance of placing traditional knowledge and nature-based solutions at the heart of local development.

Sunkpa Women Story

The Sunkpa Shea Women’s Cooperative operating within the Mole Ecological Landscape, is a group of eight smaller women’s associations numbering about 800. Initially mobilised by the Community Resource Management Area (CREMA), the women are supporting sustainable management of the shea parkland by collecting shea nuts and producing shea butter for local use and international consumption. Some of the cooperatives focus on shea nut collection and others on shea nut processing (boiling/steaming, roasting, drying, milling, grinding and kneading by hand).

Shea nut processing in the Mole Ecological Landscape. Photo Credit: A Rocha Ghana

To improve product quality, ensure sustainable access to inputs, and help them access wider markets, the women decided they needed to expand their activities by entering the organic shea butter value chain. The women’s activities now include women-managed 700,000 seedling capacity tree nurseries with shea and other indigenous tree seedlings for shea parkland restoration and sustainable management that will eventually provide sustainable sources of shea nuts over the long-term.

Women selecting and drying shea nuts as part of the shea butter production. Photo Credit: A Rocha Ghana

To diversify the value chain by entering a new market, the women trained in organic shea butter production, certification, standards acquisition, and quality assurance, finally producing organic shea butter ready for local and export markets.

Well done Sunkpa Shea Women!!