Entrepreneurship Zone: 18 February 2025 : There’s global demand for Ghana’s shea nuts: This CEO saw an opportunity

Tue Feb 18 11:10:13 CAT 2025

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Entrepreneurship Zone: 18 February  2025 : There’s global demand for
Ghana’s shea nuts: This CEO saw an opportunity

 <https://www.firstcapitalbank.co.zw/> 

Dora Torwiseh

Interview with Dora Torwiseh
CEO AND FOUNDER, NUTS FOR GROWTH

Lives in: Ghana

  _____  

Dora Torwiseh, a Ghanaian entrepreneur and CEO of the oilseed processing
company Nuts for Growth, has tapped into the potential of shea nuts, which
are indigenous to Africa. The global demand for shea butter, extracted from
these nuts, is projected to exceed US$3.5 billion by 2028, driven partly by
its use in personal care products like lotions and moisturisers, as well as
in food items such as chocolates and ice cream. In northern Ghana, shea
trees grow predominantly in the wild, and the nuts are harvested by women
who collect them after they fall to the ground.

Taking a traditional industry to the next level

Torwiseh grew up in the Tumu region in Ghana’s Upper West, near the border
with Burkina Faso. Her small-scale farming community faced widespread
poverty, with limited economic opportunities and low levels of education.
Despite this, the region had a valuable resource – shea nuts – which many
people collected on a small scale. Torwiseh’s family also participated in
this trade. “My parents would wake me up between 3am and 4am so that we
could pick quickly and come back home,” she recalled in an interview with
How we made it in Africa on the sidelines of the recent Standard Bank Africa
Unlocked conference in Cape Town.

Despite the modest scale of her family’s shea nut activities, it provided
enough income to send Torwiseh to school. After completing her education,
she secured corporate jobs in the capital, Accra, working for companies like
Nestlé – a rare achievement for someone from her background. However, she
wasn’t fulfilled in these roles, troubled by the hardships her community
continued to face. During this time, she realised the potential that the
shea nuts in her region held. So she quit her job with the aim of elevating
the region’s shea nut industry.

The shea nut sector in her area faced several challenges, including the
lack of large-scale aggregation among nut collectors, which deterred
international buyers seeking to buy in large quantities. Collectors were
also exploited by middlemen, who drove to villages offering low prices for
the nuts. The women, unable to access broader markets, were effectively
price takers.

To address this, Torwiseh began organising the local shea nut pickers. “I
was moving from door to door, community to community, town to town – trying
to engage them so that we can work together to unlock this opportunity that
is within us as a region and as a country. And thank God it worked out,” she
explained.

Her next hurdle was finding a market for the shea nuts. She began by
sending samples to global buyers, but securing international clients proved
to be a long and arduous process. At times, she would arrange for large
quantities of nuts to be brought to a location to meet with a potential
client, only for them not to show up.

Persistence paid off when Torwiseh secured a Dutch buyer, now part of the
US-headquartered agribusiness company Bunge, which remains a major client of
Nuts for Growth. Today, Nuts for Growth connects over 80,000 women with
global buyers, including other clients such as American commodities giant
Cargill.

Beyond market access, Nuts for Growth supports the women in various ways,
such as providing them with seedlings to cultivate vegetables, spices, and
other crops during the off-season for shea.

Torwiseh has invested in infrastructure, including a storage warehouse and
a crushing plant that processes shea nuts into crude butter. Over the years,
Nuts for Growth has expanded its operations to include sourcing soya beans
from local farmers, which are processed at the company’s factory. These soya
bean products primarily serve the domestic market. The factory has a
combined crushing capacity of 450 tonnes per day for both shea kernels and
soya beans.

Additionally, the company has further diversified its revenue streams by
exporting shea cake – a by-product of shea processing – to countries like
Türkiye and China, where it is used as animal feed.

Navigating export markets

Torwiseh advises entrepreneurs looking to export agricultural products from
Africa to first study the international market and identify which crops are
not produced locally in certain countries.

She explained that production costs in regions like West Africa are often
higher than in more developed markets because local producers typically lack
the advanced technology available elsewhere. For instance, she won’t market
her soya bean products in Brazil because the country already has a
sophisticated soya bean industry. However, she would target Brazil with her
shea products, as they do not have a local supply.

“Not every country will be interested to come to Africa to buy certain
things because they may be growing even more in their country at a reduced
cost … You need to know things that are exportable and things that cannot be
exported,” she said.

—Howwemadeitinafrica

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