Okere City Shea Project

Okere City is a community where rural development, future aspirations, and cultural connections are consciously uplifted. They are located in the north of Uganda. The project to economically uplift rural residence started in 2019. It is completely run by solar power and is growing every year.  

Within Okere City, Okere Shea Cooperative was founded in 2020 by 20 women. It is now a 150-member organization. While sales have surged from 1 to 15 metric tons of shea butter since its inception, growth is constrained by reliance on traditional processing and costly outsourcing, which cuts deeply into profits. The project’s core economic response is to establish an in-house production facility. This will improve quality for premium markets, increase efficiency, and enable the cooperative to convert waste into valuable biochar, creating new revenue streams and aiming to enhance the economic independence of 1,000 farmers by 2030. They asked ORFL to support them in order to improve their shea value chain. We happily supported the project. The project is a transformative community initiative for Okere, a region impacted by conflict, poverty, and high illiteracy. It directly addresses severe gender inequality, where women dominate shea production but face financial exclusion and high rates of violence. By providing functional adult literacy to 500 women and boosting household incomes, the project aims to empower women, reduce a 55% school dropout rate by enabling families to afford fees, and foster long-term community development.

Environmentally, the SVAR Project is critical for ecosystem sustainability. It aims to protect 1 million existing shea trees—a threatened species—from deforestation and to regenerate 500,000 new trees by 2030. Furthermore, by producing biochar from processing waste, the project will improve soil health, sequester carbon, and build climate resilience for farmers, directly combating the climate vulnerabilities that currently devastate agricultural yields. This integrated approach ensures the shea value chain supports both the community and its environment for future generations.

Below shoes an image of the Shea butter Okere sells.