The Shea Lesson: Are women squeezed out of value capture?

As a woman evolving through life, I have increasingly come to realize that the value of women is constantly shaped by the systems around us.

From adolescence, many girls become introduced to value in distorted ways. As puberty sets in, attention shifts toward appearance. Society celebrates beauty, desirability, and femininity, and at that age, a girl could easily be misled into believing that her greatest asset lies in how she is perceived. But that is often only the visible tip of something much deeper.

Beneath it are deeply embedded gender norms that shape how value itself is assigned. Gender norms do not simply shape expectations around women and girls; they also shape which forms of contribution are rewarded, protected, invested in, or ignored.

The problem is not that women’s contributions are not valuable. Beauty, care, emotional labour, and community building matter deeply. The issue is that societies often reward these forms of contribution symbolically while concentrating ownership, capital, and long-term economic gains elsewhere.

Years later, I encountered this same pattern in an entirely different setting. I once worked on a multi-country project focused on embedding gender equality across agricultural value chains to improve women’s livelihoods. My role involved identifying and addressing structural barriers that prevented women from fully participating in, and benefiting from, economic systems. Looking back now, I realize that much of the work involved correcting distorted systems of value.

Women were already contributing significantly. They were already present, already working, already producing. Yet many remained concentrated in lower-return activities, while ownership, processing, financing, and decision-making opportunities existed elsewhere in the chain. The challenge was not participation. It was upward mobility within the system itself.

Recently, at WISCAR, as we prepare for our upcoming Financial Confidence Mastery Series focused on helping women understand and capture their value, I found myself returning to the same unsettling question: How many times have women been taught where to contribute, but not how to position themselves where long-term value accumulates?

The Story of Shea: The Myth of Participation

Gender equality, I often tell people, is not fundamentally about sameness between women and men, nor can it be reduced to social media battles over gender. At its core, gender equality is about fixing systems that exclude women.

Nigeria’s shea value chain offers an important example. Women are not absent from the shea economy. In fact, they overwhelmingly sustain it. Estimates suggest that women account for as much as 90–95 percent of shea nut collection and early-stage processing activities. Yet participation and economic positioning are not always the same thing.

Because if you look closely at the chain, women remain concentrated at its lower end. They collect nuts, sort produce, process at small scale, and undertake much of the labour-intensive work that sustains the industry. But the higher-value segments, including industrial refining, export coordination, large-scale financing, infrastructure ownership, and market control, often sit elsewhere.

And then came Nigeria’s recent restrictions on raw shea exports, designed to stimulate domestic processing, increase local value addition, and retain more economic gains within the country. On paper, the logic is compelling. Policymakers argued that Nigeria should not remain a supplier of raw commodities while higher-value processing and profits happen elsewhere. Yet policy does not enter a neutral system. It enters an existing system of unequal ownership, bargaining power, and market access. This is where the shea story becomes a gender story.

If women are already concentrated in the lower and less profitable segments of the chain, what happens when value begins to shift upward toward domestic processing without first ensuring women possess the financing, equipment, technology, and ownership structures required to move upward with it? This is what gender-blind systems often miss. They see participation and assume inclusion. But participation alone does not determine who captures long-term value.

Following the initial six-month restriction period, the Federal Government extended the policy to February 2027, signaling its continued commitment to domestic industrialization and value addition within the shea sector. The launch of a 30,000-metric-tonne shea processing plant in Niger State further reflects an important attempt to strengthen local processing capacity.

However, the challenge is that Nigeria’s current processing infrastructure still remains significantly below total national shea output. In other words, while the country is attempting to move value upward through domestic processing, the infrastructure required to absorb and equitably distribute that value remains limited. And this is where industrial policy intersects directly with gender inclusion.

If industrial upgrading occurs before women are intentionally positioned to participate in higher-value segments of the chain, then value addition may expand without necessarily expanding inclusive value capture.

From Gender-Blind Policy to Inclusive Value Capture
Nigeria’s shea value chain must become truly inclusive. There is a need to evolve across three stages: from gender-blind implementation, to gender-responsive stabilization, and ultimately toward gender-transformative restructuring that intentionally positions women to capture value across the chain.

1. Short-Term: Gender-Responsive Stabilisation
The immediate priority should be protecting vulnerable participants within the transition process, particularly rural women concentrated at the lowest end of the chain.

At the policy level, trade restrictions and industrial reforms should also undergo mandatory Gender Impact Assessments in line with Nigeria’s National Gender Policy commitments. At this extension phase, Industrial transitions should not occur without clear mitigation pathways for groups disproportionately exposed to economic shocks. This could include introducing guaranteed minimum farm-gate pricing mechanisms to reduce vulnerability to opportunistic purchasing practices. Industrial incentives can also be tied to inclusion metrics, ensuring that large processors source a defined percentage of inputs directly from women-led cooperatives at fair pricing structures.

2. Medium-Term: Gender-Transformative Upgrading
Beyond protection, the more important challenge is upgrading women’s economic positioning within the chain itself.

Currently, much of the processing infrastructure remains centralized and capital-intensive, limiting access for rural women producers. Expanding smaller-scale processing hubs and decentralized equipment access within producing communities could help women move beyond raw nut collection into higher-value semi-processing activities.

Financing will also be critical. Institutions such as the development Banks can play a transformative role by creating concessional financing windows specifically designed for women-led cooperatives and processors. Without intentional financing access, industrial upgrading risks remaining concentrated among already-capitalized actors.

Technical upgrading matters equally. Partnerships with organizations that support advanced processing training, quality certification, and market readiness for women-led enterprises. Because moving women upward within the chain is not simply about participation; it is about increasing their share of captured value.

3. Long-Term: Structural Value Capture
Ultimately, the conversation must move beyond livelihoods toward ownership. If Nigeria successfully transitions toward exporting refined shea products, cosmetics inputs, and higher-value derivatives, women cannot remain concentrated only at the raw material stage of the chain. They must also gain access to commodity exchange systems, export markets, processing ownership, and equity participation.

This may require creating dedicated commodity exchange access channels for women-led cooperatives, strengthening long-term land and resource rights around shea parklands, and ensuring women-owned enterprises are integrated into export consortiums and industrial partnerships.

Final Thoughts

Perhaps this is the larger lesson from shea.

Women are often encouraged toward forms of contribution that sustain systems, while ownership, capital, infrastructure, and long-term value accumulation remain concentrated elsewhere. And over time, participation without upward mobility begins to look like inclusion, even when it is not.

Because the real test of whether a system is equitable is not simply whether women are present within it. It is whether they are positioned to own, influence, and grow with the value that system creates.

And perhaps that conversation begins much earlier than policy. It begins with how societies teach girls to understand value itself, not merely as something attached to appearance, care, or sacrifice, but as something connected to ownership, agency, capital, and long-term economic power.