Hard Soap Making in Bougounam

The other group of women we visited on our trip to Bougounam was a soap-making group. Before Jennifer arrived they had been making hard shop to sell in the market. With Jennifer's help they realized that they were losing money by making hard soap. Therefore, Jennifer introduced liquid soap to the women. We learned how to make liquid soap earlier in training and Jennifer found that the women easily transitioned to making liquid soap over hard soap. However, for the sake of our visit the women were kind enough to show us the process in making hard shea butter soap. We of course bought some bars of soap for more then what they normally sell them for so they could make a profit off the batch of hard soap. We bought a bar of soap for 250 cfa when they normally sell them for 200 cfa in the village.

Shea butter is normally exported out of Burkina Faso and added to a lot of high end beauty products for western buyers. Burkinabe farmers get nothing for shea butter because at the raw material stage it is priced as a commodity. Where the money is to be had is when it is put into finished products to be resold adding value to the product. A major project as a SED volunteer is trying to get the Burkinabe into making goods with the raw materials they have here in Burkina Faso so they can be exported and sold at a major profit.

Dec. 4, 2008: The women prepare to make the hard soap in this big basin.

They strain the shea butter.

All the ingredients are added to create the hard soap mixture and it is stired for about 5 minutes. . .

... before it is put into a mold. The mold is the most expensive part of hard soap making and many women's groups just roll their soaps into balls which are very unattractive and hard to use in everyday washing.

The soap cutter is then placed over the tray to make uniform bar shapes.

Voila. . . wait a day and you have soap. The women stamp their women's group logo on all sides for marketing.