Soap for Hope: Empowering Jamera’s Widows, is a project that will help a widows’ group in a rural West African village start their own soap making business and take control of their lives. This group consists of 120 women who have lost their husbands and banded together in order to support each other and each other’s families.
These women have decided to move beyond mere survival and create a shared business that will help them all thrive.
We will begin with two intense training sessions. The first will teach the women how to make different kinds of soaps using locally found materials, as well as how to package and store them. The second will teach the women how to most effectively and responsibly run their business. This will include topics like reinvesting profits into the business, keeping records, how to sell their products and distribution of profits to the women involved. This project is important to this strong group of women because they are tired of living a life defined by their lack of a husband, one that is still dependent on handouts from men. They want to take control of their lives and their children’s futures by creating something into which they can pour their energies, skills and hopes.
Soap for Hope will be the realization of that dream. It will be the empowering element in their lives that will lead to stability, success and pride.
About Jamera
The village of Jamera is the cultural heart of the Nafana tribe. Swirling with red dust during the dry season and lush with jungle greenery during the rainy season, it is a rural farming village that upholds long standing tribal customs dating back to ancient times. Situated just north of the equator, this area is either hot and dry or hot, humid and extremely muddy. Also due to this global positioning, Jamera and the rest of Ghana enjoy the simplicity of twelve hour days and twelve hour nights every day of the year, so it’s easy to set the body’s internal clock to the 6 AM sunrise and 6 PM sunset every day. The Nafana people speak a tonal Senufo language known as Nafaanra. Most of the villagers are cashew farmers, selling cashew nuts as a cash crop. Like most rural Ghanaians, they maintain subsistence farms for their families, raise farm animals if they can, and hunt and trap bush meat. Without running water, the women and children pump water from boreholes in the ground and carry it far distances for hours every morning on their heads before school and other household duties.
The Nafana people celebrate the Sumgbee festival, a unique major festival held annually to mark the beginning of the yam season. Rife with Juju practices, offerings of libations and animals to the traditional large and small gods, contests, royal processions and performances, it is a thrilling and much anticipated multi-day event that reminds the people of their roots and connections, and helps them prepare for the coming year. With a population of about 3,000 people, Jamera is large enough to have a small health clinic, but it is run by a local doctor without formal training. To go to a small rural hospital, villagers have to travel to the market town of Sampa, which is about 40 minutes away by bush taxi or motorcycle down an extremely bumpy dirt road. Most of the time villagers have the local doctor stitch up their wounds and the fetish priest, or witch doctor, treats their “spiritual diseases,” which range in their minds from HIV/AIDS and Malaria to depression and psychosis. Mentally ill people and crippled people roam the streets without hope of government assistance or specialized treatment facilities. People with poor eyesight here live in a blurry world forever. Jamera has its own small rural school but it lacks basic educational facilities such as desks, walls on the school and proper textbooks and educational materials. Despite this endemic poverty, the people here embrace their communal culture and their religion – animist Juju beliefs and Christianity – and hold onto both dearly. They work hard every day outside in nature and among their extended families and friends. Though they know that others in the world have it better than they do, you wouldn’t know it from watching their daily interactions and seeing the joy on their faces as they go about their daily work of surviving and supporting each other.
A Day in the Life of a Villager in Jamera
The people of Jamera wake naturally before the sun to begin their day’s work. Each day is ushered in by the rhythmic swish of children and women sweeping out their all-dirt compounds to begin the day anew. Grass and weeds are eliminated from living areas because they harbor life threatening creatures such as black mambas, and others that aren’t deadly but still unpleasant including Emperor scorpions. Thus, the people of Jamera live in dirt. The next priority is water, for water is life. Women and children walk to one of the two boreholes in the village where they wait in line to pump groundwater into containers that they then carry back to their homes on their heads without spilling a drop. Simultaneously the cooking fire is brought back to life by blowing on embers that have been burning secretly all night. A flame jumps up and settles down along with the rhythm of the day but hardly ever goes out among the three cooking stones for years on end. Breakfast is brought to a boil by the mother or daughters while others work on hand-washing the family’s clothes in buckets and pans. This is done every day because most people do not have more than a couple of outfits to wear. Luckily the equatorial sun dries the washing quickly. Next, children walk to school if their parents can spare them, or to farm with their family. Depending on the season, villagers trek to either their cashew orchards or to their subsistence farms to spend the day working the land with hand tools and their own deeply muscled bodies. As the sun begins to set, the villagers begin the walk back to their homes where they bucket bathe and settle down around shared food bowls to eat fufu and soup with their right hands. Children do homework by candlelight while the elders talk around the fire until everyone drifts inside to sleep.
This Project’s Origin Story
During Change the World of One’s last visit to Jamera, the chief implored us to help his village in three different ways – to provide villagers access to clean water, to build toilets for them, and to help their widow’s group. This project is our answer to the third request. We met with the widows and spoke with them at length about their situation and aspirations and told them that we’d like to help them but that we believe in building people up so they can empower themselves, so we weren’t just going to give them something and walk away. Instead of gifting them rice and drinks like the politicians do, we explained that we wanted to help pave the way for them to take hold of their own futures. To that end, we told them to decide on a joint venture that they would like to start on their own, for themselves. They told us that they had always wanted to start their own soap business but that they didn’t have the resources or know-how to begin. We had them meet with others in the community who set them up with professionals in the nearby market town who could teach them to make the soap and train them in the business principles and practices that they will need to work together successfully to make their dream a reality.
“Miracle Tree” Farm
In addition to a business literacy training, a soap-making training, and equipment and materials to get the widows’ group started on their venture, there is one other crucial component to this project. The widows have decided to make three different types of soap – a local round white ball soap called “Azuma blow,” liquid soap and Moringa soap. Moringa is known as “the miracle tree” because of its manifold salubrious properties that are manifested through eating the leaves fresh or dried, and through applying them to the body in the form of soaps, creams and salves. Therefore, to create and maintain their own supply of Moringa leaves, an additional element to this project is the establishment of a Moringa and Neem tree farm that the widows will own and maintain. Neem leaves are a natural and organic pesticide, so growing them as well will help the ladies tend to their subsistence, cash crop, and Moringa farms. As they cultivate these trees and their numbers proliferate, the women can use the Moringa leaves not only for their soap but also as a nutritional booster for their families, and to sell. The leaves contain protein as well as countless vitamins and minerals that have deemed them a “super-food.” This will help with food security, nutrition and further income generation for the members of the widows’ group.
Hello,
I am very impressed by your work in helping Jamera”s widows with the soap making business
I have recently launched a start up in laundry soap making business in Nairobi, East Africa.
The training is key,so is the packaging and business development.
I would like to help where I can, especially in capacity building
Good luck with the project and hope to hear some updates on progress