| November
10, 2005: In Madame Sall’s third-floor apartment
overlooking Dakar’s busy Boulevard Général
de Gaulle, a heart-shaped wooden sign hanging over her small
propane stove proclaims “Fatou’s Kitchen.”
The modest space is the center of a juice and syrup business
that Madame Sall has built up over the last five years. Her
genius has been to add value and convenience for customers who
crave the nation’s traditional beverage, but don’t
want to go the trouble of actually creating the drink from the
red booms in the countryside.
Large bags of bisaab (Hibiscus sabdariffa) blossoms
sit in the corner next to buckets full of tamarind (Tamarindus
indica) pods and piles of ginger root. (“Bisaab”
is pronounced “BEEsap;” a final “b”
is spoken with the English “p” sound in Wolof,
the dominant language in Senegal.) The produce comes from
several of Dakar’s markets, or from her brother, who
purchases them directly from farmers in the Diourbel region,
a couple of hours into the country’s interior. In 2005,
farmers trained by The Rodale Institute® were included
as suppliers.
“I prefer to buy directly from the producers,”
she says. “The product is higher quality, more uniform.
All transformateurs want to buy a uniform product.”
On her dining room table, she displays a broad spectrum of
juice concentrates of varied hues—orangeish-pink guava,
deep crimson bisaab, ochre ginger, green ditax (Detarium
senegalense), pale yellow madd (Saba senegalensis)
, and golden mango. She slathers glue on the back of a sky-blue
label that she presses firmly to a one-liter plastic bottle
of bisaab concentrate.
The label reads: “JANA Sirop de Bisaab au gout nature”,
naturally flavored bisaab syrup. An owl surveys a green tree
and slogan at the bottom of the label: “Pour l’equilibre
des écosystèmes,” for balancing out the
ecosystems.
Leveraging her way
Like many women throughout West Africa, Madame Sall purchases
produce and processes it into juice or syrup concentrate for
sale in the city. The production of value-added food products
is central to the livelihoods of most women and girls from
all economic backgrounds in crowded urban centers such as
Dakar. Revenue provides them with economic and social leverage
in an otherwise male-dominated society.
Madame Sall moved to Dakar from the Diourbel region in 1986
to start university. She married shortly thereafter. She shakes
her head smiling with disbelief at how time has flown, “Gaaw
na dè! It’s been fast!” Like many Senegalese
women, she belongs to a women’s group. In 1999 the group
participated in a training workshop on fruit transformation
run by Winrock International (www.winrock.org).
She later completed a certification program at the Institut
de Technologie Alimentaire (www.ita.sn).
After these two training programs she began training other
women in making beverage concentrates. She now works with
a small group of processors called “Saf Na,” the
Wolof phrase for “tasty.”
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She started small in her kitchen, making three bottles of
tamarind juice that she sold to friends. Then she made seven
more, then 10, then 20. Five years later, she makes about
600 bottles a month. “I can’t make more than 600
liters. I’d really like to make more than that.”
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, she and three employees
crowd into the small kitchen to begin cooking down the produce
and adding sugar. “When there’s dittax, there’s
a big demand and I have to hire another person.”
She sells the bottles for about $3 each. Every month she
sells out, mostly to several national grocery chains. She
has a verbal agreement with these markets. To formalize a
contract would require that she open a business account with
an initial $100 deposit. Most of the other women she knows
making juice have similar verbal sales agreements due to prohibitive
banking fees. “I know many women doing the same, but
most are amateurs who make only 6 to 10 bottles a month.”
While this informal economy or “petite commerce”
is the backbone of trade in West Africa’s urban centers,
it is difficult to quantify and often overlooked by the government.
Even though she sells all that she currently produces, she
complains that penetration of the local retail market is difficult.
“Conquering the market is very hard, especially if you
don’t have transportation,” she’s found.
“You have to survey the products on the shelves, pass
by regularly.”
Barriers separate food from the hungry
The logistics of small-scale production is also difficult.
Madam Sall’s ginger press is too heavy and bulky to
bring up three flights of stairs, so she has to grind the
roots below before bringing them up to her small kitchen.
And she criticizes the lack of government support for small-scale
entrepreneurs like herself. “People are suffering from
malnutrition, yet they throw away produce because there are
no buyers! It’s as if they don’t want Senegal
to develop.”
She believes semi-industrial production spaces with food
processing equipment would allow entrepreneurs to get existing
food to hungry people in Senegal. “All the [government
has] to do is help us organize. We have everything we need
here, so I ask myself why people suffer from malnutrition!”
Madame Sall has met with the chief government official dealing
with small business activity, le Ministère de l’Artisanat,
to try to convince him of the importance of improving infrastructure
and capacity building for small-scale juice and syrup producers.
She would like to see additional training in production and
marketing. An incubator kitchen would streamline production
and improve hygiene during the transformation process from
fresh produce to processed food.
Echoing the concerns of small-scale producers worldwide,
she voices her frustrations in trying to compete economically
with industrial-scale processors who benefit from economies
of scale. “Sugar is expensive for me, but the industries
buy it a lower price.”
She’s been trying to get around this disparity for
some time, but expanding her market niche takes a discouragingly
long time. “It’s slow. Four years and you don’t
move forward. It’s really hard.”
Yet taking on the structural challenges and sticking with
the fight have raised her profile as a leader. The enormous
spread of colorful made-from-real-fruit concentrate bottles
on her dining room table belies the suggestion that her story
is anything short of inspiring to women and small-scale entrepreneurs
throughout Senegal. 
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