UNCTAD reported in May 2021 on the Eudafano Women's Cooperative in northern Namibia, established about 22 years earlier. It brings roughly 2,500 women in 27 associations into a marula value chain: members harvest and crack marula kernels between May and November, and the cooperative presses up to 12 tonnes of marula oil a year for the cosmetics industry under BioTrade principles. Its international buyers include The Body Shop International. Sales reached US$158,000 in 2020, 14% more than in 2019, and members receive fair prices for the kernels they deliver.
The lesson is not that every community will replicate these numbers. It is that organised harvesters with agreed quality standards and a reliable buyer can earn from a wild fruit tree that would otherwise be sold raw.
What Takura Trust is doing
The same fruit tree family, amarula (marula), grows in the lowveld districts of Zimbabwe and central Mozambique. Our Harvesting Amarula and Baobab Fruit projects and our Women Harvesters' Cooperatives and Digital Payments project bring harvesters together with Nura Organica (www.nura.org), which trains, buys, processes and markets natural products. Members set their own cooperative rules, keep savings and receive payments by mobile money, so the income is recorded and belongs to the women who earn it.
