When a mid-season policy freezes a supply chain
On 26 August 2025, Nigeria announced a six-month halt on exports of raw shea nuts. By then, we had mobilised private financing, signed export contracts, and trained our partner farmers to gather, sort, crack, and dry shea kernels, the semi-processed step before butter. Overnight, working capital sat idle, and shipment timelines snapped.
A quick note on definitions: Raw shea nuts are the uncracked fruit; shea kernels are the dried, de-hulled seed; shea butter is the extracted fat. The ban targeted nuts, but its intent, to push more value-addition at home, spilled over to operators like us who export kernels to long-established overseas processors.
Nigeria sits on one of the world’s largest shea belts, yet we’re underrepresented in global shea value chains. The instinct to build domestic capacity is right. But timing and execution matter. By mid-June (mid-season for us), processor quotas, budgets and offtake plans were already locked. There was no practical pivot to domestic processors at that point without breaking other contracts.
This isn’t the first time Nigeria has tried to steer markets with hard stops. From the Hides & Skins framework (1940s) to the land-border closure in 2019–20 to the maize-export criminalisation bill in late 2024, the logic is familiar: keep raw materials at home, fight leakage, and build local industry. But the reasons sudden export restrictions underperform haven’t changed:
1) We have a production problem: Our yields are chronically lower when compared to our peers because most production is smallholder-led and underserved. Grants and NGO projects help at the margins, but scale demands season-fit extension, drying/quality infrastructure, and reliable aggregation.
2) We have a financial problem: Appropriate working capital remains scarce. Flagship schemes that should have filled the gap (e.g., Anchor Borrowers Scheme) faltered on governance and recoveries. Cheap credit without discipline, offtake and enforcement is not finance.
3) We have an incentives problem: When cross-border arbitrage pays and borders are porous, blanket bans tend to divert rather than develop trade. Informal traders route around policy; formal operators eat the friction.
At Aké Collective, we built around those realities: a lean, farmer-led model where women’s cooperatives act as primary processors and community aggregators. It keeps overheads low, quality high, and local impact real. In what became a short foray into shea this season, partner incomes rose materially, up to 4x, for women who had long abandoned the shea trade. Despite the expectations of policymakers, the sudden shea ban did not translate into a sudden shift to butter-making within these communities. Without guaranteed buyers, equipment, and working capital, telling rural women to “process more” is not a plan.
What would make the policy bite without breaking operators mid-season?
● Time-bound transition: Announce bans pre-season with a dated glide path; grandfather already-contracted volumes.
● Clarify scope: Exempt kernels that meet domestic value-add thresholds (e.g., moisture, FFA specs) while still discouraging export of unprocessed nuts.
● Processor certification & quotas: Prioritise domestic processors with verifiable capacity; allocate transitional quotas for exporters linked to local offtake commitments.
● Season-fit working capital: Create an accountable SME window (not grants) tied to delivery and quality metrics; pay rural women processing groups on acceptance, not on hope.
● Border discipline that targets leakage, not compliance. Focus enforcement on high-risk corridors and known arbitrage, not operators with mapped farms and traceable lots.
Nigeria should absolutely become a hub for value-added shea. But we get there by matching policy timing to season economics, by backing operators who already execute, and by aligning incentives so the formal route wins. Otherwise, we freeze the very supply chains we need to build the processors we want.
Aké Collective will keep doing what works: training, traceability, moisture-controlled drying, and cooperative-led aggregation, so that when the market is ready for more in-country processing, our partners are ready too.
