This September, the capital of Ghana’s Northern Region will host an event poised to reshape one of West Africa’s most culturally significant and economically promising industries.
From September 2–4, 2025, Tamale will welcome more than 8,000 participants for the World Shea Expo 2025 – an international gathering that blends trade fair, policy summit, and cultural showcase.
Set against the theme, “Empowering Women and Youth-Led SMEs: The Role of Government and Financial Institutions,” the Expo will draw everyone from rural shea nut collectors in Ghana’s savannah to executives from global brands that rely on shea for their products. The aim is clear: Elevate shea from a largely raw-export commodity into a globally recognized, high-value industry that benefits those who power it most – women and youth.
Shea, known locally as karité or “women’s gold,” supports more than one million women across Ghana’s Northern, Upper East, and Upper West regions. These women supply the raw material for a global market valued at over $2 billion. Yet, most earn only a fraction of the final retail value, as Ghana exports the majority of its shea in unprocessed form.
READ: Ghana set to host World Shea Expo 2025 in Tamale
In 2023, Ghana shipped over 70,000 tons of shea products worth approximately $112.6 million in foreign exchange. However, with most exports leaving as raw nuts, the lucrative processing, branding, and retail segments remain dominated by foreign firms. The missed opportunity is substantial; processed shea products can command up to ten times the price of raw nuts.
A Government Vision for Transformation
In recent years, the shea industry has climbed steadily up Ghana’s agricultural priority list. Once regarded as a “secondary crop” that complemented the dominance of cocoa, shea has now been reclassified in government circles as a strategic economic resource with the potential to drive rural industrialization, create thousands of jobs, and diversify the country’s export base.
President John Dramani Mahama’s administration has made its intentions clear: Ghana must no longer be content with exporting raw shea nuts while others capture the wealth from processing and branding. Instead, the aim is to own a greater share of the global value chain ; from the farms and cooperatives where the nuts are harvested, to the sophisticated processing lines that produce refined butter and derivative products for cosmetics, food, and pharmaceuticals.
This vision is being championed through the Presidential Initiatives in Agriculture and Agribusiness (PIAA), which has identified shea as a priority sector for targeted investment. At the heart of this transformation plan lies the revitalization of the Buipe Shea Factory; a facility that has long stood as both a symbol of promise and a reminder of the industry’s challenges. Once fully rehabilitated and modernized, Buipe is expected to become one of the largest shea processing hubs in West Africa, capable of producing refined butter and high-value derivatives that meet stringent export standards.
This push ties directly into the government’s flagship 24-hour economy policy. The idea is ambitious: to create a continuous production and trade environment where industries like shea can operate at maximum efficiency, unhindered by the limitations of traditional working hours. For the shea sector, this means more shifts in factories, faster turnaround on exports, and a round-the-clock supply chain that responds quickly to global market demands.
But the 24-hour economy is more than just about speed. It’s about unlocking new opportunities for employment, especially for women and young people in the north who often face limited work options outside of farming seasons. By making shea processing a viable, high-value, year-round industry, the government hopes to stimulate not just export earnings but also inclusive growth – where prosperity reaches the very communities that have sustained the shea trade for generations.
The Role of Ghana EXIM Bank
If government vision is the compass guiding the shea industry toward transformation, then finance is the fuel that will get it there. In this equation, the Ghana Export-Import Bank (GEXIM) is a critical driver; uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between policy ambition and commercial reality.
Created under the Ghana Export-Import Bank Act, 2016 (Act 911), GEXIM was designed to do precisely what the sheaindustry now needs: support trade between Ghana and the rest of the world while building Ghana’s competitiveness in international markets. As the country’s principal export finance institution, the bank’s mandate is clear, and perfectly aligned with the goals of the shea sector’s transformation.
GEXIM’s functions go far beyond simply providing loans. They include:
Credit Facilities: Financing exporters, processors, cooperatives, and their buyers; making it possible to scale up production, acquire modern processing equipment, and meet international quality standards.
Guarantees & Insurance: Protecting exporters against payment risks, giving them the confidence to enter new markets and sign bigger contracts.
Import Financing for Manufacturing: Enabling processors to import specialized machinery or packaging materials that may not be available locally.
Co-Investment Partnerships: Collaborating directly with businesses to establish new processing plants or expand existing ones.
What makes GEXIM especially well-suited to this role is its institutional history. The bank emerged from the merger of three specialized entities: The Export Trade, Agricultural and Industrial Development Fund (EDAIF), the Export Finance Company (EFC), and Eximguaranty Company Limited. Each of these brought expertise in financing agriculture, industrial processing, and export risk management. Together, they created an institution with the depth and experience to finance not just trade, but transformation.
For the shea industry, GEXIM’s involvement could be the difference between incremental progress and a generational leap forward. Processing factories require significant upfront capital; cooperatives need affordable credit to buy nuts in bulk during harvest season; exporters must meet exacting international quality standards that often demand expensive testing and certification processes. These are not challenges that goodwill alone can solve, they require patient, strategic financing.
By partnering closely with government agencies, private investors, and grassroots producers, GEXIM can ensure that the financial lifeblood of the shea transformation flows where it is needed most.
Sustainable Support for Government’s Shea Vision
For Ghana’s shea industry to move from potential to prosperity, its financing model must be as sustainable as its natural resource base. Short-term injections of capital can ignite progress, but only a long-term, well-structured financing ecosystem can keep the transformation on course. This is where GEXIM’s role extends beyond lending into strategic industry stewardship.
To sustainably support the government’s vision for the sheasector, GEXIM can anchor its approach on three interlinked pillars:
1. Financing Value Addition at Every Stage
The fastest way for Ghana to capture more wealth from shea is to shift the export mix away from raw nuts toward processed and branded products. That means financing not only large-scale factories like the soon-to-be-revitalized Buipe Shea Factory, but also community-level and SME-scale processing units in rural areas. Smaller processors, when adequately funded, can produce high-quality butter that feeds into both domestic value chains and export markets.
This decentralized approach has multiple benefits: it reduces transportation costs for rural producers, increases employment opportunities within communities, and creates a supply base capable of meeting diverse buyer specifications. For GEXIM, structuring affordable, medium-to-long-term financing for such facilities — coupled with technical assistance — could have a compounding effect on national output and quality.
2. Empowering Women and Youth Through Tailored Credit
Given that women account for about 90% of the workforce in the shea value chain, GEXIM’s financing must be gender-responsive. That means offering loan products with flexible repayment schedules that align with harvest cycles, providing microfinance at low interest rates for start-up cooperatives, and combining credit with business training so borrowers can manage growth effectively.
For youth entrepreneurs, access to capital must go hand-in-hand with capacity building in product development, branding, and digital marketing. A young shea processor with the skills to create premium skincare products and the financing to scale production could transform not just her own life, but the livelihoods of dozens of women she sources from.
3. Strengthening Ghana’s Position in Export Markets
Financing production is only part of the equation – market access completes the loop. GEXIM can champion Ghana’s sheaproducts internationally through trade missions, participation in global exhibitions, and funding for branding campaigns that position Ghanaian shea as a premium, ethically sourced, and environmentally sustainable product.
Beyond marketing, GEXIM can also finance export certification and compliance processes. Many global buyers require stringent quality and safety certifications, which can be prohibitively expensive for smaller exporters. By covering or subsidizing these costs, the bank can open doors to high-value markets in Europe, North America, and Asia.
The Long-Term Payoff
By embedding environmental stewardship, fair trade practices, and inclusive growth into its financing frameworks, GEXIM can ensure that the industry’s rise is resilient and equitable. The vision is not just to create a profitable shea sector, but one that uplifts rural communities, protects the environment, and builds Ghana’s global brand.
In doing so, the bank won’t just be a financier, it will be an architect of the country’s export-led industrial future, with sheas one of its cornerstone industries.
As the countdown to September 2, 2025 continues, anticipation in Tamale, and across Ghana, is building. The World Shea Expo 2025 is poised to be more than an industry gathering; it will be a defining moment in the nation’s economic narrative. For the first time on this scale, producers, processors, policymakers, financiers, and international buyers will share the same platform, with the shared purpose of reshaping the sheasector from the ground up.
If the event delivers on its ambitions, it could signal a turning point: Ghana moving from being a supplier of raw shea to a recognized global hub for high-value, ethically sourced, and environmentally sustainable shea products. Such a shift would not only multiply export earnings but also deepen their impact, ensuring that wealth circulates within the communities that make the industry possible.
This is the broader promise of the Expo, inclusive growth. By elevating women and youth from subsistence workers to entrepreneurs, by creating steady jobs in rural processing plants, and by connecting Ghanaian brands directly with high-value markets, the shea industry could become a model for how natural resources can fuel industrialization without leaving communities behind.
Institutions like GEXIM will be instrumental in translating the momentum of the Expo into lasting progress. Financing must flow where it matters most: into value-adding infrastructure, into the hands of small and medium-sized enterprises, and into the global branding that positions Ghanaian shea as a premium product.
The government’s 24-hour economy policy, paired with this renewed focus on agro-industrial transformation, sets the stage for shea to move beyond seasonal income into a year-round engine of prosperity. And by hosting the Expo in Tamale, the message is unambiguous: the future of shea will be rooted in the communities that have nurtured it for generations.
When the opening ceremony begins and the President delivers his keynote address, the world will be watching. But more importantly, Ghana’s farmers, processors, and traders will be listening, eager to see if this moment will truly usher in a new chapter.
If the vision holds, the World Shea Expo 2025 could be remembered not just as an event, but as the moment Ghana claimed its place at the top tier of the global shea industry; with women, youth, and sustainable growth at its heart.
To register for the Expo, visit: www.worldsheaexpo.com
