Karité producer Coprokazan sets example in Mali

In two years time Coprokazan has managed to double its production and its sales from 16 million Francs CFA to 32 million Francs CFA (nearly 50,000 Euro), partly due to increased and improved marketing and promotional activities based on ICT.

Coprokazan has already trained numerous other organisations and specifically their use of ICT to better promote their produce has been recognised by the Ministry as a key outstanding success. As such, Coprokazan has been rewarded by the Ministry with several hundred kilos of rice.

The Ministry has now decided to promote more organisations in other parts of the country to start producing karité butter. The first karité producing cooperatives from Mali have already paid a visit to Coprokazan to learn from their success.

Coprokazan (Coopérative des Productrices de beurre de Karité de Zantiébougou) was founded by the Zantiébougou Women Group in 2005 to bring together female producers of shea butter. In Mali, especially in the rural areas, women often find themselves in a disadvantageous position due to lack of education and inadequate access to other benefits like health care. The Zantiébougou Women Group is one of several organisations helping to strengthen the social and economic position of women by offering information, training and support to female agricultural producers. Coprokazan was founded to specifically strengthen the position of female producers of shea butter. Today, 365 women spread out over 21 villages in the area of Zantiébougou, located in the Sikasso region South of Bamako, are member of Coprokazan.

Together with the Malian Association for the Promotion of Youth (AMPJ) Coprokazan decided to seek solutions to the problems of marketing shea butter resulting in the launch of the IICD supported ‘Kari&ICT’ project in 2007. The goal of the project was to facilitate sales of shea butter at the national, regional and international levels by developing a market for Coprokazan’s shea butter and, in so doing, improve the living conditions of its members. The project helped to improve the communication between Coprokazan and AMPJ, the identification and compilation of a directory of shea butter buyers, the computerisation of Coprokazan 's accounting system and to improve the information and marketing of their products towards existing and potential customers. Customers in Bamako include supermarkets and chemists' shops and on sub-regional and international levels the cosmetics and chocolate industries.

IICD helped Coprokazan with:

• the installation of lighting and computers
• a training of women in the use of standard software and office automation tools
• the installation of e-mail
• the creation of a website
• advertising on radio and television, as well as
• advice on how to sensitise other female shea butter producers to improve the quality of their produce by means of showing scanned pictures of good and “bad” practices. 

So far the project has been quite successful as Coprokazan managed to double its production and sales from 16 million FCFA to 32 million FCFA in only two years time.

Part of the profit will be directly re-invested in the cooperative to strengthen marketing activities and part of it will go the individual members. How much that will be is yet to be seen as the members will get their profit in the form of a refund of their membership fee which is being determined by the profits the cooperative has made on a yearly basis. Still, the producing members have already benefitted as they managed to sell their shea butter for a higher price compared to last year. Instead of 75 FCFA, they now receive 100 FCFA per kilo shea butter. The financial motivations – sort of salary - have also been augmented.