Surrounded by four children, Ladi Usman scoops shea nut paste from a plastic container into a metal pot on the stove in her cramped kitchen.
Squinting to keep charcoal fumes out of her eyes, she stirs it with a bamboo stick, completing the final stages of eking out the valuable shea butter oils.
For the past two decades Usman, 39, has relied on shea nuts — and the oil they contain — to provide a livelihood for herself and her family in central Nigeria.
“I cook with it, I sell it and the money I get from it I use to take these children to school, to hospital and everything else,” she told AFP.
Together with 50 other women in a cooperative in the village of Kodo she extracts value from shea nuts that grow abundantly in Nigeria.
Shea butter is consumed worldwide in chocolate, margarine and cooking oil, and cosmetic giants are using it more and more as a natural moisturiser.
The global shea butter market is expected to be worth $3.5 billion by 2028, according to Transparency Market research.
Experts say the huge number of shea trees in Nigeria could be a major source of income.
But potential profit is being lost as it exports just 10 percent of the 350,000 tonnes of shea nuts produced annually as finished products to lucrative world markets.
Nigeria could satisfy up to 60 percent of global demand for shea, “and with many companies in Europe and America using shea butter as an alternative to cocoa butter the potential is enormous,” said Aderemi Akpatira of the National Shea Products Association
“We as a nation just need to get ourselves organised and take that leadership place.”
‘Middle men’
For women working in the Kodo collective, extracting oil from shea nuts takes several stages and a lot of work.
First Usman and the other women collect the nuts and remove the sweet pulp either to be eaten or fermented into a wine that is consumed locally.
The nuts are then washed and boiled to prevent germination before being roasted on charcoal ovens.
Most of the nuts are sold at that point by Usman and the rest of the collective for the oils to be extracted industrially.