Women kick the sand from their slippers, and ease into the cool comfort of a natural hair and skincare store in central Dakar. On the shelves are jars filled with handmade supplements of organic shea butter, coconut, castor and olive oils, sourced from across west Africa.
In floral silk hijabs and abaya dresses, the women sit on sofas near the back of the store, discussing their hair beneath a mural of poised black women and men, wearing a mixture of classic natural black hairstyles...[more]
Abiola Ogunrinde founder of Dudu Osun organic soap #Nigeria
The Desert Date Company #Uganda – A natural ingredient supplier and skincare brand https://soundcloud.com/african-tech-round-up/sets/miniseries-entrepreneurial
From African Tech Roundup:
This bonus podcast miniseries episode features Lauren Servin, the American Founder and "Chief Tree Officer" of the Desert Date Company. The Desert Date Company is a natural ingredient supplier and skincare brand based on the banks of the Nile River in Northern Uganda...[more]
Caludia Togbe founder of ‘Origine Terre’ #Benin A Hair & Skincare company
From Agribusiness TV:
Caludia TOGBE, holds 3 masters’ degrees. With just 12.000 FCFA, she started to manufacture hair and dermatological products based on natural products. Marketed today under the brand “Origine Terre”.
Uganics anti-malarial soap from #Uganda
The Scientist Entrepreneurs of Prof BioResearch – A Producer of Biochemical & Natural Products in #Uganda –
via PrePaid Economy:
Urban dwellers are gradually beginning to realise the importance of growing plants with medicinal value in their compounds. Most of these plants include stevia rebaudiana for processing natural sugar, citronella grass for mosquito repellant, lemon grass and lemon eucalyptus for processing tea leaves.
These were some of the plants exhibited by scientists from Prof Bioresearch at the recently concluded Seeds of Gold Farm Clinic which took place at Makerere University Agricultural Research Institute, Kabanyolo (MUARIK). Most farmers were flocking the tent where the plants were being exhibited not only to get knowledge about their use but many bought seedlings for planting...[more]
Zabbaan Holding is Bottling #Mali ‘s wild plants for nutritious drinks
Spore reports:
Mopti region holds special significance for 27-year-old Aïssata Diakité. Not only was she born there, but the region is also home to Zabbaan Holding, her company that makes juices from bush plants. The business is even named after a local plant – zaban – which looks like passion fruit and produces sweet juice with an acidic hit that is extremely popular with children.
Diakité left the countryside to study for her baccalaureate in Mali’s capital, Bamako, before heading to Amiens, France, to complete an agribusiness course. But the place where she grew up was instrumental in her decision to become an agribusiness entrepreneur before setting up her own ‘ethical’ food processing company. “My business reflects my career path, my environment and my passion,” she says...[more]
How to Turn Plants Into Tinctures, Like an Ancient Alchemist
From Gastro Obscura:
A beginner’s guide to extracting flavors from herbs and flowers.
...Theoretical curative properties aside, there are delicious reasons to extract flavors from plants. Compared with the complicated process of distillation, infusion (the method of stewing petals, stalks, or leaves in alcohol, oil, honey, or water) is nearly foolproof. Steeped in tradition, it’s an easy and affordable way to jazz up foods and drinks from trifles to tipples.More here
We asked Sarah Lohman, a historic gastronomist and the author of Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine, to lay out a recipe for making simple infusions at home.
Baton Toothpicks Made in #Nigeria
Baton Home of high-quality, cost-effective "wood" products that just so happen to be beautiful kitchen products.
The Wood Merchants of #Nigeria
Yemisi Adegoke writing in the Guardian:
If you were asked to name a major market in Lagos (Nigeria), which one would come to mind first?Alaba? Balogun? Computer village? Tejuosho? You’d be right of course.
Each of these markets are huge in their own right, known by Lagosians and beyond for employing hundreds, or in some cases, thousands, and pumping millions of naira into the economy.
There’s another market in the heart of Lagos doing the same thing, one that you've probably never heard of...[more]
ChebHair Powder – A Hair Conditioner from Chad
In the hair products space- Chebhair
Beautifully Nappy, Nigeria- Online Organic and Nature Beauty store
In Businessday:
Beautifully Nappy has unveiled Nigeria’s first online organic and nature beauty store, a platform to showcase and educate individuals on natural hair and the benefits of using natural hair products.
A self-taught skincare entrepreneur from #Ghana exports to Japan
The BBC reports
Tsaka Skincare Products
Okay Africa profiles the founder of Tsaka , Celmira Amade:
“There has been very little change in the mainstream beauty market to address the needs of people with melanin-rich skin. While there has been some evolution in availability of makeup and hair care, skincare continues to lag behind,” Amade says.TSAKA plans to fill that gap by developing an internationally-recognized inclusive beauty brand. In recent years, African beauty ingredients like shea butter and marula oil have gotten their fair share of hype. TSAKA hopes to add a new addition to that mix: Olacaceae extract. The flowering plants are only found in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Madagascar, and have anti-inflammatory properties that can help fight hyper pigmentation. In TSAKA’s signature face mask, the natural ingredient not only detoxifies the skin, but also minimizes blemishes. Launched in 2016, the beauty line is the first in the U.K. to exclusively use Olacaceae extract.
Photo courtesy of TSAKA.
Frankincense and Sustainable Livelihoods
HabiTec Furniture
Sisathi Nomatye reporting at Nunnovation:
Angola’s 27 year old civil war left the country in ruins, leaving hundreds of schools without desks and chairs. This sad reality is what inspired social start-up HabiTec to embark on a journey of recovering the industrial sector in the country. The start-up manufactures school furniture and building materials made from local wood. habi“Using the large population of eucalyptus trees in Huambo, we produce high-quality desks, chairs and other wooden fittings to meet the growing demand of Angola’s expanding school system. In addition to providing a growing population with access to school equipment and furniture, we also include local communities in the replantation of new trees. 20 percent of our workforce are former soldiers with disabilities and many of our staff have been employed for the first time in their lives,” explains Felisberto Capamba, co-founder.More here
Liha Beauty – A Natural Skin Scare Company
Chioma Nnadi writing in Vogue:
If you grew up in an African household (or as part of an extended Nigerian family, like this writer), then you’re likely familiar with the look and feel of raw shea butter—crumbly in texture, bumblebee yellow in color—at the very least. “There’s a lot of demystifying that needs to be done around shea,” says Abi Oyepitan, one-half of the British duo behind Liha, a new organic skin-care line that’s gaining a cult following out of London. “I think you could easily call it the ultimate African beauty secret.”More here
Medicinal plants: Going wild for new opportunities
Susanna Cartmell-Thorp writing in Spore:
Worldwide, wild plant resources currently meet 70 to 90% of the market demand for medicinal and aromatic plants (MAPs) used in the food, pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries. MAPs offer multiple opportunities for producers and consumers. But concerns about overharvesting and loss of biodiversity, combined with complex regulations around access and benefit sharing (ABS), have hindered growth in this sector...[more]
TAMA & Peini – Skin Care Brands
From the Dziffa shop:
TAMA cosmetics and Peini are two innovative skin care brands transforming Africa’s status as an importer of bleaching creams to a global exporter of healthy, organic skin care...The young visionaries behind these brands work hand-in-hand with local shea producers to produce beautifully packaged soaps, oils, mosquito repellants, and hair creams out of raw shea.
In less than four years of existence, Pieni has helped countless widowed shea producers in Northern Ghana while TAMA has transformed the lives of 2,500 women in its SeKaf Shea Butter Village...[more]
Nari Palm Juice
Nari Palm Juice is an Africa-inspired health brand. For thousands of years the sweet sap of the palm was identified as a ‘spiritual’ drink. Our brand and products embrace the spirituality and colourful, creative, ancient culture of West Africa.
Nari means ‘100’ in Igbo, the local language of the second most popular tribe in Nigeria. It represents the fact that we are 100% natural.
Creating the "Bark to the Roots" Collection, by Jose Hendo
CNN reports:
More hereOld really is gold for budding designer Jose Hendo, who is reviving an ancient material for the catwalks of Kampala. She's turning bark cloth, a fabric fashioned from trees in Uganda for over 600 years, into haute couture - and turning heads in the process.
image via CNN
"What's so exciting about it is the shapes I was getting, were just amazing," Hendo says.
"Very sculptural, very avant garde."
Her latest collection "Bark to the Roots" featured at Kampala Fashion Week earlier this month.
"This is one of the signature looks of this identity collection, and what I tried to do is to achieve an element of working completely with bark cloth," she says.
"Every season I apply it in a different way, different technique, and try to keep pushing the boundaries with it."
Oribags Innovations
In MakingIT:
In 2007, the government of Uganda banned the import, sale and manufacture of plastic bags, leaving many Ugandans striving to find appropriate alternatives. In this context, in early 2009 Rusia Orikiriza Bariho, at that time freshly graduated from university, set up a business to transform agricultural waste such as straw, elephant grass, banana fibre and cotton waste into environmentally friendly bags.
The company, Oribags Innovation, quickly won plaudits and in 2010 it won the SEED Award for sustainable consumption and production recycling...[more]
Kenya Bamboo Center
Rina Waligo of Nairobi Design Week in conversation with the Kenya Bamboo Center:
Felix Akoko, the Production Manager of Kenya Bamboo Center is extremely passionate about bamboo and it is evident in his work. In his workshop located at the Nairobi Trade Show Grounds in Dagoretti, Felix shared his experiences with making bamboo furniture. He works with Polycarp Mboyah, who is in charge of propagation and Bosco Muthiani. Although there were quite a number of pieces at their showground, most of the products had been taken to Baba Dogo for a creative workshop. Outside his work, Felix teaches Zumba and offers gym training in his hometown Olympic in Kibera.images via Kenya design Week
How Felix Akoko got into the bamboo industry happened almost by coincidence. When he was in high school, he was a big fan of soccer but after suffering from a leg injury he could no longer play.
‘‘Louis Taylor, a friend of mine from the United Kingdom encouraged me to find something to do and introduced me to a Ghanaian gentleman who had recently ventured into bamboo. Under his apprenticeship I learned everything I came to know about bamboo.
When he started out his training he began with simple tasks like sanding but was keen to learn a lot. He soon came to be the best worker at the venture and in 2011 Felix Akoko’s mentor asked him to take over the business. In order to improve his knowledge he was also trained by the Kenya Forestry Institute where he learnt more about bamboo designs and finishing. Some of Kenya Bamboo Center’s other partners include Kenya Forestry Authority and Norway’s Waterstone Resource Fibre Limited...[more]
Modjo "Leather" City
Fungus: The Plastic of the Future
From Motherboard:
In this episode of Upgrade, Motherboard dives head first into the R+D world surrounding the development of fungi as a viable replacement for plastic, and the people who hope it can lead to a better and more sustainable future.
"Lou Bess? Dakar Farmers Market"
In Senegal:
Lou Bess? Dakar Farmers Market is a monthly event that promotes local consumption and well being of the community. Held the first Saturday of each month, the fair allows the encounter between local food producers and consumers á looking for quality food, Senegal. More than just a market, Lou Bess? (Wolof term for what's new?) is a community event with all-day activities for youth and adults. On the menu of music, dance, cooking workshops, and abundant, fresh products and meals prepared by independent farmers, bakers, chefs and health contractor and well being.
Golden Madagascan Silk
Hadley Leggett in Wired:
images via Wired
A rare textile made from the silk of more than a million wild spiders goes on display today at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
To produce this unique golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk existing in the world today.
1-spiders“Spider silk is very elastic, and it has a tensile strength that is incredibly strong compared to steel or Kevlar,” said textile expert Simon Peers, who co-led the project. “There’s scientific research going on all over the world right now trying to replicate the tensile properties of spider silk and apply it to all sorts of areas in medicine and industry, but no one up until now has succeeded in replicating 100 percent of the properties of natural spider silk.”
Peers came up with the idea of weaving spider silk after learning about the French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué built a small, hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them...[continue reading]
images via Wired
Natural Hair products from Body Butter
CNN startup Africa showcases Body Butter a skin & haircare company:
Hair and beauty is a billion-dollar industry across Africa. And Ghanaian entrepreneur Korkor Kugblenu is hoping to cash in on the latest craze: natural hair.
Ibo Coffee
A Slow Food Foundation project:
Also known as "lucky islands", the Quirimbas form an archipelago north of Mozambique. Ibo, with a little more than 400 inhabitants, is one of the main islands; the place is said to have accommodated Vasco de Gama during his circumnavigation of Africa. The village streets and houses on Ibo still echo the long Portuguese rule. Fishing is the main activity here and every day men go to sea on long motor less sailing boats, mostly catching crabs, a well-known resource of Mozambique.
On the island, as well as in small areas of the mainland, Coffea racemosa Loureiro is grown, a lesser-known species alongside arabica and robusta that belongs to a group of species commonly known as "wild coffee". Endemic in Mozambique, Coffea racemosa Loureiro has adapted itself to the local climate: this plant grows at heights ranging from sea level to 1500 meters, can withstand long dry seasons (up to nine months) and is not particularly demanding (it grows well even on sandy soils and needs relatively little shade)...[continue reading]
SoleRebels US expansion
Forbes reports:
More hereBethlehem Tilahun Alemu launched her first US offering at the beginning of this month; a flagship store of her eco-friendly shoe brand, SoleRebels, in Silicon Valley, California. The Ethiopian shoe brand’s first international retail space is located at Westfield Valley Fair Mall in San Jose, California, an upscale indoor shopping mall in Silicon Valley.
Photo Credit: SoleRebels
The SoleRebels founder & Chief Executive Officer said in a statement, “I am totally vibed to open our first US soleRebels store in Silicon Valley. We have waited a while to open our first US store because we wanted to find the perfect place to open our first US location.” Alemu described her company’s new store location in the Bay Area as “a place that epitomized the creativity, innovation, craziness, disruption and the overall WALK NAKED ethos that soleRebels is all about. Silicon Valley is the epicenter of all these things and so it’s the perfect place to launch our US retail store business and I imagine there are quite a few folks in and around Silicon Valley who can’t wait to be able to ‘walk naked.’”
Exploring Medical and Nutrition secrets from Plants
From TED Global 2014:
Ameenah Gurib-Fakim is a professor at the University of Mauritius, and she’s here this morning to show us five plants unique to where she works and lives: the Mascarene Islands. She introduces us to benjoin (terminalia bentzoe), a plant with leaves of many different shapes that evolved to escape the jaws of grazing tortoises, who have poor eyesight and avoid leaves they don’t recognize. This amazing plant could hold the answer to antibiotic resistance, she says. Next, Gurib-Fakim points us to the baobab tree (adansonia digitata), sometimes called the “tree of life.” This tree could be the answer to food security, because its fruit — the “monkey apple” — contains more protein than human milk. “Biodiversity underpins all life on earth, and yet we don’t realize how valuable and precious this resource is,” says Gurib-Fakim. “When a plant or animal goes extinct, disappears from the face of earth, we have lost an entire subset of the earth’s biology, along with the medicinal or other properties it possesses.” As she says, “Every time a forest comes down … it’s a potential lab going down with it.”
Rungwe Avocado Company
From AWF:
The southern highlands of Tanzania are an invaluable ecosystem—but may also prove fertile grounds for agriculture.
This region features the largest and most important montane grassland in Tanzania, making it a critical ecosystem. At the same time, the government of Tanzania has targeted this area for development as part of an agricultural corridor that will help increase Tanzania’s economy and food security.
A sustainable agricultural enterprise and proper zoning here, however, will help stabilize land use.
Smart investing will protect land and livelihoods. African Wildlife Foundation’s impact-investment subsidiary, African Wildlife Capital (AWC), provided a loan to the Rungwe Avocado Co. in Tanzania’s southern highlands, to support an environmentally sustainable growing and export project for avocados. Under the terms of the investment, and bound by AWC’s conservation covenants, Rungwe will intensify avocado production in a limited area while also engaging the agricultural services of local farmers, simultaneously increasing income to local communities and limiting agricultural sprawl.
Avocados now benefit 2,000+ farmers. One year after the AWC investment, more than 2,000 local farmers are directly growing avocados for Rungwe, with the goal to increase this to more than 5,000 outgrower farmers.
International Make-up Brands Targetting Africa
From Smart Monkey TV:
Global beauty ambassador Eryca Freemantle talks about: how the international make-up brands are investing in Africa; why women of color spend more on beauty products than their white counterparts; the kinds of beauty products the international brands have for women of colour; local beauty brands in Nigeria; and the massive interest from Nigeria in a competition for hairdressers and make-up artists.
Kanshi Skincare
Founded by Dzigbordi Dosoo:
Kanshi is a colorful collection of facial care, body care and lifestyle products with ingredients inspired by the flavors of West Africa, including Papaya, Mango, Coconut and Shea Butter. Lush aromatic scents and carefully selected natural ingredients are the hallmark of all Kanshi products. All products are paraben free & are not tested on animals.via The Spec
Khulu Soaps
Superb product design from Fanakalo for Khulu Soaps:
Khulu Soap is an original and authentic manufacturer of soaps infused with traditional African herbs and was the first to launch this type of product in South Africa after two years of experimentation with different combinations of herbs.
Hand made soap, infused with traditional wild herbs from the heart of Africa. There are 5 different soaps, each packaged and designed with a specific African theme.
Catherine Kaluwa – Research Scientist
In SciDev:
Catherine Kaluwa, a PhD student from the University of Nairobi, Kenya, talks about the journey she has taken from walking barefoot to school to researching the efficacy of plants that women in her homeland have traditionally taken for family planning. She also outlines some of the challenges she has faced as a female researcher working in a male-dominated profession.
Madagascar’s healing plants
Mau Forest Dried Nettles – A Wild Herb Staple
Bob Koigi writing in Farmbizafrica:
Image courtesy of Oliver Migliore |
Vegetables and herbs that were traditionally farmed by native communities around the Mau forest as an important ingredient in Kenyan cooking are making a comeback in local markets, thanks in part to a group of women now supplying nettles to hotels in Rift Valley that specialises in indigenous cuisine like Mukimo, a Kikuyu favourite.More here
The women have been transplanting wild nettle seedlings into seedbeds on land where they once grazed livestock. The plant does well in highlands at altitudes of 2000 to 3000 meters, taking around two months to produce leaves that are harvested manually from March to June and during September and October. The nettle plant can be harvested whole if young. But when plants are older, only tender leaves are picked.
The farmers then immerse the nettles in water after harvesting to soften the sting and sell them fresh in the market, or they dry the leaves on sisal sacks in the shade for 8 to 12 hours and then grind them. The shade matters, as drying the leaves in direct sun interferes with the attractive bright green colour where the nutrients are. But it is the dried nettle leaves that are delivering the best returns.
Somalia’s Frankincense
From the annals of underutilized resources, Discover Somalia highlights an opportunity for processors, its Frankincense production:
More here...A female labourer, breaking down and purifying the resin; this process involves separating the resin from the bark, and collecting the vital elements of the resin.
Image courtesy of Discover Somalia