MAKING A DIFFERENCE...
- Gifty Serbeh-Dunn
- Jan 7
- 2 min read
I grew up in northern Ghana in West Africa in the heart of what could be called the global shea butter capital.
When I moved to Canada in 1980, I was amazed that North Americans did not know about shea butter.
Over the years I became impassioned with the need to share shea butter with the world in a way that would benefit everyone, especially the women who made the shea butter and the people who would use the product.
In 1999, I started experimenting with shea butter, adding essential oils and marketing products in little brown glass containers.
In 2003, I travelled to Ghana and met the Tapko Widow’s Group, a group of widows from a northern Ghana village who had banded together so they could help each other to better feed and educate their families.
One of their main activities was gathering shea nuts and making them into shea butter. I recognized the quality of their product and the rightness of their cause, and bought 1,000 pounds of shea butter on that very first visit and arranged to have it shipped to Canada.
My first commercial shea butter business, SheaCare, was launched with the intent of wholesaling raw shea butter in North America.
Working from my kitchen, I continued to combine shea butter with high quality essential oils and other natural materials to make special products for friends and family.
The people who used my handcrafted products kept telling me amazing stories about what it had done for them.
Stories about soothing dry, cracked and bleeding skin, saving savaged lips and healing bedsores became commonplace.
It seemed like everyone was telling me that a product this good, that could provide so much help to West African women, should be marketed more broadly.
After discussing this with family and friends, I decided to create another business that develops and markets shea butter based products.
This was the start of Shea Butter Market.
And the journey continues...
By Gifty Serbeh-Dunn . First Published in Island Gals Magazine . 2013 . Volume 1 . Issue 1 .
