Think Creative Spring 2024

Left: Eric N'Guetta (right) with a villager in Djelebelé, Côte d’Ivoire.

tional women to meet the demands of the international market,” N’Guetta says. Bio Amandes collects and processes high quality shea butter sourced from 2,800 rural women. Bio Amandes has trained women on modern agricultural practices, provided tricycles to help them transport their goods and launched programs to diversify their income-generating activities. “We have set up a fair-trade program that enables us to pay women a higher price than the market price,” N’Guetta says. “The fair-trade program allows us to immediately reinvest 50 percent of our profit to the women.” In 2022, for example, Bio Amandes made a profit of $1 million—of which $500,000 went to rural women. Through a grant from the USAID-funded West Africa Trade & Investment Hub to the impact investor Injaro Investments Ltd., N’Guetta unlocked a $1.07 million loan that allowed Bio Amandes to build a refinery in March 2023 that can process up to 2,500 metric tons of shea. “We started from zero,” N’Guetta says. “From zero, we’ve grown to more than 2,000 tons today.” The refinery has created jobs for women and youth. Fatoumata Kone joined Bio Amandes after high school as an intern. Now she maintains equipment in the refinery—providing financial stability and social standing among her peers. “Now I can support myself, help my parents financially,” Kone says. “When people see me in my work clothes, I’m respected.” N’Guetta has big plans for the business, its staff and producers. “The next step is to go even further in processing, to make, to fractionate and produce shea oil, to really do more,” N’Guetta says, “to go even further in the processing of shea butter so as to create more added value locally and impact more women and satisfy many more customers.” n

Balancing the Scale

How one entrepreneur is creating fair trade opportunities for women and youth in rural Côte d’Ivoire

By Pariesa Brody

Côte d’Ivoire native Eric N’Guetta left Abidjan to study in Europe, where he stayed after graduation and settled into a successful career in finance. After several years, N’Guetta felt the urge to go back to Côte d’Ivoire. “I needed to bring something back to my country. I needed to create added value there,” N’Guetta says. “So, I decided to return to Côte d’Ivoire—not to Abidjan, but to remote places

where there is nothing—and start a new life as an entrepreneur.” Relocating to a rural city called Ferkessédougou, he set his sights on locally grown shea. Harvested mainly by women, shea nuts have become highly sought after internationally as a raw material for cosmetic products. But N’Guetta saw that the women earned little and were stuck producing raw materials.

Photo by Jim Huylebroek

24 | Think Creative | Spring 2024