Vice President Professor Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang has opened the World Shea Expo, 2026 in Tamale with a call for stronger partnerships, investment and value addition to transform the shea industry.
The three-day expo, which opened on Tuesday, seeks to promote investment, innovation, processing, branding and market access in the shea sector as well as position the country to capture a greater share of the growing global shea market.
It is under the theme: “From Local Commodity to Global Brand: Accelerating Women and Youth-led Value Addition in Shea”.
It is organised by the Office of the Presidential Initiatives in Agriculture and Agribusiness (PIAA) at the Office of the President in partnership with Savannah Golden Tree Limited, Ghana Export Promotion Authority (GEPA), Ghana EXIM Bank, Tree Crop Development Authority, Ghana Commodity Exchange, Ghana Enterprises Agency, Northern Development Authority and the Coalition of Shea Industry Associations.
About 7,000 participants including women’s cooperatives, youth-led businesses, processors, exporters, international buyers, financial institutions, development agencies, traditional authorities, researchers, entrepreneurs and the media are participating in the event.
It features exhibitions, panel discussions, investment forums, policy dialogues, training workshops and field visits as well as business-to-business linkages and opportunities expected to generate exports worth close to $10 million.
Vice President Professor Naana Opoku-Agyemang, addressing participants, said the expo was an opportunity to recognise the contribution of the shea tree while thinking seriously about how to build a more inclusive and prosperous industry around it.
Ghana currently produces an estimated 130,000 to 150,000 metric tonnes of shea nuts annually, valued at about $350 million compared with $118 million in 2023 while unprocessed shea nut exports accounted for $177 million in non-traditional agricultural earnings.
The country was ranked the world’s leading exporter of shea butter in 2025 and has the potential to increase annual production to 400,000 metric tonnes, valued at approximately $640 million through investments in modern processing facilities, mechanised harvesting, cold storage and all-season logistics.
The global shea market is projected to exceed $3 billion by 2030.
More than one million women and young people are involved across the shea value chain in the country, from harvesting and processing to product development and marketing, but many continue to derive limited economic returns from their labour due to inadequate access to finance, weak infrastructure, disorganised markets and insufficient policy support.
Vice President Professor Naana Opoku-Agyemang said economic growth would only be meaningful when farmers, small business owners, young people and families could directly identify with and benefit from it, expressing need for stakeholders to ensure that women received a fair share of the value they helped create in the shea industry.
She also challenged stakeholders to enable women to move beyond collection of shea nuts into aggregation, processing, manufacturing and exports while securing ownership stakes in companies, brands and distribution networks.
She said the government’s initiatives such as the Feed Ghana Programme and Farmer Service Centres were improving access to machinery, technology, technical support, storage and markets.
She urged participants at the expo to develop partnerships, financing arrangements, research collaborations and investment proposals to help transform the shea industry.
She touched on the government’s planned Women’s Development Bank, saying it would help women including those requiring relatively small amounts of capital for businesses to access finance and strengthen their livelihoods.
Dr Peter Boamah Otokunor, the Director of Presidential Initiatives in Agriculture and Agribusiness, said the expo was a renewed commitment to transforming the shea industry into a vehicle for inclusive economic growth, women and youth empowerment and global competitiveness.
Dr Otokunor said the government had revived the Buipe Shea Processing Factory, which was established in 2012, adding when fully operational, the factory would process more than 60,000 metric tonnes of shea nuts annually and could peak at 180,000 metric tonnes under 24-hour operations.
He said the factory had the potential to create between 300 and 1,000 direct jobs and more than 10,000 indirect jobs while serving as an anchor for smallholder cooperatives across the five regions in the north.
He mentioned the Nuts 4 Growth Limited, a private sector, woman-led shea processing facility at Duyin in Tamale saying it had a processing capacity of 300 metric tonnes per day and annual production capacity of 90,000 metric tonnes.
Dr Otokunor said the John Mahama Shea Demonstration Farm, established on 30 acres in Tamale, would serve as a research and development facility, heritage site and potential anchor for shea tourism.
He said a Technical Management Committee had been established to oversee the demonstration farm, with the West African Centre for Shea Innovation and Research at the University for Development Studies hosting the Committee.
He said researchers at the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana had developed a hybrid shea variety capable of maturing in three years compared with between 20 and 30 years for the wild variety.
Dr Otokunor said more than 20,000 sets of personal protective equipment had been distributed to women’s cooperatives and shea collectors across the five regions in the north with support from GEPA and Ghana EXIM Bank.
He said the government would continue to develop and enforce national standards for shea kernels and butter to enable local products to meet premium market requirements in Europe, North America and Asia.
Mr Ali Adolf John, the Northern Regional Minister, said the shea sector had enormous potential to drive rural transformation, employment generation, women’s economic empowerment and export growth.
He called for a shift from the export of largely raw shea commodities towards value addition, processing, product development, branding and access to international markets to generate foreign exchange.
Alhaji Imoro Issifu Alhassan, the Chairman, Savannah Golden Tree Limited, said the 20,000 protective items distributed by the government had contributed to improved safety in the shea collection process adding the company had not recorded any incident of snakebite amongst women involved in picking shea nuts during the year.
He said continued investment in protective equipment and other forms of support for women would help increase shea nut production to feed processing factories and other enterprises in the sector.
He urged stakeholders to sustain efforts to empower women and strengthen the shea value chain for the benefit of Ghana’s economy.
