An opportunity for women in Mali

To my friends,

For one year now I have lived in M’Pedougou, a subsistence farming village in the fifth poorest country in the world. I wake up in my mud hut at dawn to fetch water, I hike to the fields with my host family and help them hack the dry Sahelian earth with short-handled hoes, and I try as best I can to help them improve their lot in life. As an ‘Environment’ Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, West Africa, my job is to help people manage their natural resources in both an ecologically and economically sustainable manner.

Mali suffers from several unique distinctions: in addition to being ranked 173rd of 177 countries on the United Nations’ Human Development Index, it also ranks among the worst for gender inequality. Women carry the heaviest load in the struggle to survive in the harsh climate of the Sahel. They wake up before the roosters to collect firewood, heat water for bathing, pound millet and corn into flour in order to cook three meals a day over smoking fires, and when the rains have come they go to the fields to eke out an existence on depleted soils. All of these duties are performed with infants strapped to their backs and several more children in tow.

The United Nations recognizes that in order for rural, agricultural, illiterate societies to develop, women must be given an opportunity to lighten their burden. In villages like M’Pedougou, women are responsible for feeding their families and caring for their children with little access to an independent income. All field crops, such as peanuts or cotton, are sold by the men. All garden produce, such as bananas or tomatoes, are sold by the men. In rural Mali, the sole domain that remains for women is the shea tree.

The shea tree produces a small fruit with an oil-rich nut that women collect, dry, and process to extract butter for cooking, medicinal purposes, and for selling. This income from shea butter pays for children’s clothing and school fees, vegetables and sauce ingredients that provide valuable nutrients, salt, soap, household supplies, and medicine for the women and children.

In recent years, the international market for shea products has expanded, from use as a cocoa butter substitute to pharmaceuticals, leaving Mali (which has the second largest population of shea trees in the world) trailing behind other shea producing countries in West Africa. Malian women traditionally dry the shea nuts by roasting them over a fire, which introduces smoke and carcinogenic compounds which are forbidden by international regulation. According to the NGO ProKarite, ”A lack of product quality standards and technical proficiency of producers has greatly constrained market opportunities for rural producers of shea, particularly in Mali which has long suffered from a reputation as a source of poor-quality shea kernel and shea butter.”

Last year when I was living in Paris I bought a small pot of shea butter in an upscale boutique for 15 Euros. The same quantity sells for 15 cents in M’Pedougou. In order to give at least a fraction of that higher share back to the women who deserve it, many groups and NGOs are working across West Africa. In Mali, USAID (the US Agency for International Development), several local organizations, and the US Peace Corps are working together to provide women with the training and the organizational skills they need to improve Mali’s reputation as a shea producer and to give rural women higher prices for their shea products.

The first step in this process is teaching women how to improve their shea processing techniques, to shift from smoking their nuts to sun-drying them. In my past year as a volunteer, I have participated in several educational meetings and trained my Malian “counterpart” (a farmer in M’Pedougou) how to lead more trainings on improved shea butter production. Together, we have travelled to several local villages and we are poised to organize an area-wide group that will sell improved butter (at higher prices!) next year.

Finally, I was in discussion with my director at the Peace Corps over the difficulty of training illiterate women on something that can’t be demonstrated. At trainings, we must discuss the process in the abstract – as there is no way to collect nuts, wash them, dry them, store them, pound them, and make them into butter in a one-hour meeting with a women’s group. We alighted on the idea of making a training video that could visually demonstrate the process, from start to finish, and enumerate the steps clearly in Bambara (the language I have learned, spoken throughout Mali). Once finished, the video could be used by USAID staff, Peace Corps volunteers, and several NGOs in their regional training efforts. It could be played on laptops, DVD players (frequently found even in small villages!) and projected on screens in larger towns and cities. Finally, the video could be shown on the Malian TV station, ORTM.

As a graduate of the film production program at the University of Southern California, the possibility to use my skills during my Peace Corps service excites me greatly. I have with me in Mali a high-definition video camera, but I lack the means of turning my raw footage into a movie. All I need is a computer and editing software in order to turn my mud hut into a miniature MGM, M’pedouGou Movies (ok, I don’t have electricity, but Sikasso is close).

My own salary as a Peace Corps Volunteer doesn’t include an allowance for new laptops or editing software, so I am asking for donations to help me in this project. My parents are coming to visit me in December. They have offered to deposit checks in my account and to order the computer and bring it to me when they come.

My goal is to raise $3500 to cover the costs. Please donate what you feel you can afford. You can mail checks (payable to Jessica Luna) to:
John Luna
24663 Ervin Rd
Philomath, OR 97370.

In love and light, saying goodbye to the rains and hello to the cool Harmattan winds,
Wishing you peace
Jessie

Making shea butter.
My women's group, who are ready to form a shea butter association.