Shea pickers at East Gonja appeal for warehouse

Tamale, Dec. 6, GNA - Development Frontiers Women Cooperative (DFWC), an association of shea pickers and processors in the East Gonja Municipality, has appealed to government to construct warehouses in the area and help boost their incomes.

DFWC said the absence of warehouses in the Municipality has made them to lose incomes from shea nut sales as they are not able to collect sufficient quantities and store them throughout the year.

This was contained in statement signed by Ms Grace Ayijunu, the Secretary to DFWC and copied to the Ghana News Agency in Tamale on Thursday.

The statement said “in some cases, women lose the quality of their nuts due to poor household storage.”

DFWC’s vision is to ensure bulk picking of the shea, aggregation at specific locations and bulk sale to an organized buyer in a kind of warehouse receipting system.

The Cooperative is planning to rely on available public and private warehouses for this business model or at best own a number of warehouses.

It commenced operations but had to shut down buying and selling of nuts due to challenges of access and utilization of warehouses.

The Cooperative, with funding from Business Sector Advocacy Challenge Fund, and its partners, USAID, European Union and DANIDA, implemented a number of activities including a research and census on the number of modern warehouses in the Municipality.

The findings of the research revealed that “majority of storage facilities in the area are made up of local structures and in the last 20 years, the Municipality has never had any form of commercial warehouse”.

The statement appealed to government and the East Gonja Municipal Assembly to ensure that “every market constructed in the area has a warehouse and big store for use by communities even on rental basis.”

GNA

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