Guest Voices: White Gold in southern Chad

Next up in our series of guest posts from Concern Worldwide, we look at a great program that helps to provide income to women in Chad. Program Support Officer Francesca Reinhardt describes a cooperative that helps turn the local Shea nut into white butter for the women to sell to market.

I’m based in a small town called Goz Beida in eastern Chad. It’s a dusty corner of the Sahel, where the bulk of the traffic comes in the form of slow-moving donkeys and camels. It’s an unforgiving environment, but I’m learning things here that I don’t think I could learn anywhere else.

Chad is a vast landlocked country, covering several eco-zones, and some of the highest rates of poverty on the planet. The challenges are enormous. Chad has the world’s highest child infant mortality rate, and is in the bottom five countries ranked by the United Nations Human Development Index. Chad has experienced not only natural disasters, but also civil conflict, the internal displacement of populations, refugees fleeing violence in neighboring Central African Republic (C.A.R.) and Sudan, the Sahel food crisis, drought, flooding, and cholera outbreaks.

This is a country of extremes. Forbidding deserts stretch to the north. People scratch out a living in small villages across the Sahel, fed by transient rivers called wadis that sink into the sand. As you move south, the cattle get fatter, the mud-brick houses get sturdier, and the savannah gives way to flood plains and rice paddies. Keep going and you reach the humid, tropical south. That’s where you’ll find the town of Goré, about 30 kilometres from the border with C.A.R.

With its heavy soils and massive trees, the area looks like it should be rich and fertile, but the struggling villages tell a different story. Goré now hosts 35,000 refugees from C.A.R., and the soil is exhausted. The harvest feeds most families for just seven months of the year. After that, they are reduced to foraging, debt, and hunger. Raw materials are scarce, and few goods are produced locally. Everything from farm tools to cooking oil comes from hundreds of miles away, shipped in on treacherous roads, at exorbitant cost. Plastic goods come on overloaded trucks from Nigeria, trundling along the wrong side of the road to their final destinations; soap and plastic shoes make the trek here from as far away as China.

“MINING” LOCAL RESOURCES GIVES WOMEN INDEPENDENT INCOME

Ask the women in Goré what they want and they’ll tell you simply that they want their own source of income: “We have to spend so much on so many things, why not make something we can keep ourselves?” says Lydie Nadjilem, a member of Mekasna. Mekasna is Goré’s biggest Shea butter collective, and it also wants to be the richest. “We are looking at land to plant an orchard; this would make it faster to collect the Shea nuts. So far, we have saved 50,000 Cefa [about 100 USD]. That’s already a third of the way there,” says Mekasna’s President, Maris Mokodji.

Shea nuts are indigenous to southern Chad, and have been traditionally pressed into a black oil to add to foods. While nutritious, it has an odor that many find unpleasant. Processing the Shea nuts into a white butter gives it all kinds of household and commercial applications, opening up new income streams for local women. This is southern Chad’s “white gold.” “Soap is the best,” says Maris “because everyone has to buy it. Cooking oil is good too. Otherwise we wait for it to come from Cameroon, and the money goes back to them.” Concern supports Mekasna, along with 21 other collectives, with training and management of equipment for Shea butter production. Concern also provides the collectives with vital training, guidance, and support on financial management and running cooperatives.

“With the white Shea butter, we can do so many more things,” says Maris. “But above all we want the money. We want our own money. You can’t just wait for the boss [the husband] to come up with school fees. You can’t just fold your arms and wait for him to give you money.” She laughs, “You know the day you come to him for money he will say he has none.”

With 50 members, Mekasna can produce 10-15 litres of Shea butter a week—weather and resources permitting. Hauling the water, nuts and fuel, and pounding the nuts is a long and laborious process. Ask the members though, and they’ll tell you it’s worth it. Shea butter sells for around $6 per pound, and it saves women buying costly commercial soaps and oils. While it’s normally hard to compete with industrially produced goods on price, not having to pay transport overheads makes Mekasna’s prices more competitive. With Concern’s help, Mekasna has plans to invest in a motorized mill to raise productivity.

After several years of bad harvests, it’s hard to know what each year holds. Now these women have a backup plan. “I feel better knowing there will be a little money if things go wrong,” says Lydie. “We have money in our savings box and we all take our share so nobody can cheat us. If I have to borrow money in the market, I might not be able to pay it back. I like to know that my money is safe.”

The sweet maguey plant from Mexico

We are seeing a rise in farming co-operatives throughout the developing world. In the co-op, members can pool their resources to try to increase the number products or crops they sell to market. Yesterday, Concern Worldwide gave us a post about a co-op that helps to improve irrigation resources. Today we find one about farmers who grow a sweet plant in Mexico.

From the Inter Press Service, writer Emilio Godoy describes the co-op for the maguey plant.

"It has to reach a heavy boil so that the water evaporates, leaving the syrup," Rómulo, 45, an indigenous Otomí woman, told Tierramérica, explaining the process for turning the nectar of the maguey, or pulque agave plant (Agave atrovirens), into something the consistency of honey.

Rómulo is one of the founders of the cooperative Milpa de Maguey Tierno de la Mujer, made up of 22 women and one man who harvest this spiny-leaved plant in the community of San Andrés Daboxtha from a 73-hectare field, located about 120 kilometres northeast of Mexico City.

The pulque agave products have become the leading source of revenue for the Otomí indigenous peoples in the central Mexican state of Hidalgo, complemented by maize crops, sheep ranching and ecological tourism.

"It has been a long process and they have learned about many areas. They have received training and have strengthened the organisation. The women themselves do the marketing," said Jocelyne Soto, delegate of the non-governmental organisation Enlace Rural Regional (Regional Rural Link, ERRAC), founded in 1988 to promote productive initiatives in impoverished areas.

ERRAC, which also has a presence in the states of Querétaro, in central Mexico, and Oaxaca, in the south, has backed the cooperative since 1989, when efforts began in this arid zone to replant with maguey and lechuguilla agave.

The maguey, which does not need much water to grow, is cultivated primarily in Hidalgo and the neighbouring state of Tlaxcala, on about 6,000 hectares for a total of 12 million plants, according to figures from the Secretariat (ministry) of Agriculture and the National Institute of Statistics and Geography.

The maguey nectar, made with the "aguamiel" (honey water) extracted from the plant, is a sweetener 1.4 times stronger than refined sugar and is rich in fibre and proteins. In addition, the plant's fructose does not stimulate insulin production like other sweeteners do.

A co-op empowers sex workers in Calcutta

An alternative newspaper from British Columbia is running a fascinating series about sex workers in Calcutta. The Tyree is running excerpts from the book Humanizing the Economy: Co-operatives in the Age of Capital. The book spends a chapter exploring a co-operative that helps to organize and empower women who work in the Calcutta sex trade.

The sex trade co-operative looks after health needs first, providing condoms for sex workers and doing regular testing for diseases. The co-op also helps the women work for themselves instead of for pimps and gangs. Tools such as micro-credit and micro-savings established within the co-op help the women avoid being forced into servitude for someone else.

From The Tyree, our snippet grabs from the second segment in the book adaptation series. Author John Restakis describes how the co-op was established.

Key to the tale is Dr. Smarjit Jana. When the World Health Organization asked Jana and his team to lead an AIDS prevention project in Sonagachi in 1992, he already knew well the dire health risks faced by that neighbourhood's sex workers. An epidemiologist teaching at the All India Institute, Jana had just finished the first baseline survey of Sonagachi's sex worker population, finding of the 450 women surveyed, 45 per cent used occasional contraception in some form with only 27 per cent using it regularly. Only 2.7 per cent were able to insist on the use of condoms. Laboratory results showed that of 360 sex workers tested, over 80 per cent were found infected with one or more STDs while about one per cent tested positive for HIV infection and four of these had syphilis. The question uppermost in the minds of the women surveyed: "Will I be able to have a child?"

Now Jana and his team took on launching the STD/HIV Intervention Program (SHIP). It had three components: the provision of health services; information and education on sexually transmitted diseases; and promotion of condom usage among sex workers.

In addition, Jana's SHIP team remained clear about their approach. They believed that sex work was a profession and had to be seen as legitimate. No attempts were made to rescue or rehabilitate sex workers, nor were moral positions taken on their work. The emphasis instead was on improving the material conditions of sex workers and the communities in which they live and work.

Health was central to this task. For sex workers, a regular checkup is an occupational necessity as the risk of STD or HIV infection (or re-infection) is an occupational health problem that they constantly face. Isolated and easily intimidated, the women were often powerless to resist demands from men to have unprotected sex.
...

USHA Multipurpose Co-operative was finally incorporated on June 21, 1995. Its objectives were:

• enable the sex workers to generate a sustainable economy
• act as a credit co-operative and give loans to members
• sell daily necessities at reasonable rates
• supply condoms to various organizations who run STD/HIV intervention programmes
• develop self-employment opportunities for sex workers
• take up activities for the uplift of sex workers and their families

From 1995 to 1998, USHA had only 200 members. Women were fearful. The co-ops attempt to establish a credit system for sex workers was a direct challenge to the moneylenders and their sponsors and their reaction was swift and brutal. Dr. Jana and his staff received death threats. Bombs were used against co-op organizers and outreach workers. Sex workers who had joined the co-op were savagely beaten up.

Most vicious of all were the "youth clubs" who were controlled by landlords and who were in league with the loan sharks who financed their activities. These included "community festivals," religious events and the collection of puja (offerings) for temples and assorted Hindu deities. All these activities were part of the trappings of local power in the district and a cover for the more sinister role these youth played in intimidating and harassing the women on behalf of the local bosses. It took two years of determined struggle to dissolve the fear that sex workers had of joining the co-op.

Today, of the 16,000 sex workers that work the area, 12,800 are members of USHA. Through their membership in USHA, sex workers have been able to save money, take out loans and even invest in businesses and property as a means of transiting from sex work, particularly in their older years. Without access to credit and the ability to save money, sex work is akin to bonded slavery.