By the Land Facility. Originally published April 1, 2026 by the Land Portal Foundation. Republished from the original article under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Original embedded images have been omitted and one broken link corrected.
Related project: The Land Facility.
How digital mapping and policy innovation are strengthening women’s shea tree tenure in West Africa
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Ground Rules E05
Editorial note: This is the 5th blog of the ‘Ground Rules’ series—an initiative of the Land Facility Decision Support Unit (DSU) that explores how ‘thinking and working politically’ can support more adaptive and effective programming in land governance and beyond.
In this edition, the Land Facility expands on a presentation about its Shea Tree Mapping Project delivered during the 5th International Land Management Conference (ILM5) on how digital tree mapping and policy engagement can support women’s resource rights across West Africa.
Quick read:
- Shea is a vital resource in West Africa, generating over USD 2.5 billion in export value and supporting an estimated 16 million West African women producers.
- Women’s rights to harvest shea are rooted in customary tenure arrangements but largely unrecognised within formal land governance systems.
- Undocumented tree rights puts women shea producers at risk; an estimated 40% of surveyed women report losing access to land or trees they previously managed.
- The Land Facility is supporting digital mapping tools that can help translate customary tenure into information that governments, financial institutions, and markets can recognise and use.
- A proposed Shea Tree Tenure Protocol shows how collective action and policy innovation can help secure women’s resource rights while protecting landscapes.
At this year’s ILM 5 conference, held in early March, a team of experts, including Claudia D’Andrea (Land Facility), Aaron Adu (Global Shea Alliance), and Adron Naggayi Nalinya (New Markets Lab) shared lessons from an innovative project in West Africa that is helping make women’s rights to shea trees visible, recognised, and economically meaningful.
The presentation, Gendered Dynamics of Shea: How Digital Mapping and Global Market Expansion Are Reshaping Shea Tree Tenure and Women’s Rights in West Africa’s Shea Parklands, highlighted how strengthening women’s tenure rights over shea trees can improve livelihoods, access to finance, and long-term stewardship of shea parklands.
In the countries of Ghana, Benin, and Togo, where the programme is focused, shea is an important resource. Used in cosmetics and food products worldwide, the sector now generates more than USD 2.5 billion in export value, while supporting the livelihoods of an estimated 16 million West African women producers.
Across West Africa, women typically access shea trees through customary arrangements tied to family land, lineage, or community agreements. This means women may hold recognised rights to harvest and manage shea trees even without owning the land where they grow. Despite their central role in harvesting and processing shea, women’s rights to these trees are often informal and largely unrecognised within formal land governance systems.
“Women have the traditional right to collect and process shea, but in practice, women’s tree rights are conditional, and their relationship with men is what determines who gets to have access to land,” explains Adron Naggayi Nalinya, Agriculture Programs Coordinator in Africa for project partner New Markets Lab.
Women working together to process shea nuts. Photo by Vanessa Adams.
Visibility matters for women’s livelihoods
As pressures on land mount from climate change, agricultural expansion, and competing markets, women are losing access to the trees they have been managing. Evidence gathered through the project suggests that nearly 40% of surveyed shea producers have lost access to land or trees they previously used.
Managing Director of the Global Shea Alliance, Aaron Adu, emphasised, “The lack of documentation also limits women’s access to finance. Lenders and buyers often require proof of control over productive assets before extending credit or entering into supply contracts. When women’s tree rights are undocumented, they remain largely excluded from formal financial systems.”
To address this gap, the Land Facility programme is using digital mapping and geo-referencing technologies to document nearly 100,000 individual shea trees, linking them to the approximately 9,000 women who manage them. This information feeds into a data-protected, open-access platform that allows users to visualise shea parklands and women’s tree tenure relationships.
Snapshots of the Shea Tree Mapping dashboard, visualising individual trees and tenure analysis.
By making these rights visible, the platform helps governments, investors, and buyers better understand the role women play as custodians of shea landscapes.
To get here, Land Facility prioritised consultations with traditional authorities, government institutions, women’s cooperatives, private sector actors, community organizations, development partners, and financial institutions to build broad stakeholder support for strengthening women’s tree tenure rights.
The Land Facility programme is funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and its shea butter regional project is implemented in partnership with the Global Shea Alliance, Farmerline, Level4International, and New Markets Lab.
Beyond mapping, the project also seeks to influence policy and legal frameworks by identifying gaps in how women’s shea tenure rights are recognised and protected.
The Shea Tree Tenure Protocol
One of the key innovations presented at the conference was the draft Shea Tree Tenure Protocol, a framework designed to document, recognise, and safeguard women’s shea tree-use rights across West Africa’s shea-producing landscapes.
The protocol provides a structured pathway for these rights to become progressively visible and usable within governance, administrative, financial, and market systems—without requiring women to convert their customary rights into full statutory land ownership.
This approach reflects a key insight from the project: strengthening women’s tenure security does not necessarily require replacing customary systems with formal land ownership models. Instead, it requires bridging customary practices, state institutions, and market systems.
This perspective is echoed by traditional leaders working directly with shea-producing communities. Chief Prof Yakubu, traditional leader of the Zugu area and custodian of communal lands in northern Ghana:
“For generations, shea trees have stood quietly across our landscapes, feeding families, sustaining women and supporting a global industry worth billions of dollars. Yet, despite their value, shea trees have remained largely neglected in decision making, policy frameworks and investment priorities. We talk about cocoa, we talk about timber, but shea—this tree that has kept our mothers and grandmothers alive—has been left behind. Development will not come from reports alone. It will come when we use this evidence to change laws, influence policy and protect what truly belongs to our people.”
Through consultative workshops in Ghana, Togo, and Benin, the programme has sought to validate the assessment of gaps in documentation, recognition, usability and protection of women’s shea tenure rights across government and customary leaders to derive targeted recommendations to close these gaps at both national and regional levels.
Key Lessons
- Natural resource governance often focuses on land parcels, yet livelihoods in many rural economies depend on rights to specific resources—such as trees.
- Visibility strengthens rights. When tenure relationships are documented and recognised, women’s bargaining power, access to finance, and ability to defend their livelihoods improve.
- Digital mapping tools can help translate customary tenure systems into information that governments, financial institutions, and markets can recognise and use.
- Because the shea sector spans multiple countries, regional coordination is key to harmonizing policies and protecting shea parklands.
- The shea sector highlights the links between gender equality, climate action, and financial inclusion. The proposed shea tree tenure protocol demonstrates how collective action and policy innovation can help secure women’s resource rights while protecting critical landscapes.
Related Links
Link to shea tree tenure dashboard
Read more about Land Facility
Read more about the Land Facility’s work in Shea tree tenure in West Africa