Afroelle Magazine's June Issue 2016

After Rahama completed her internship, she moved to Mali where she spent the next two years as a Peace Corps volunteer working in a small village as a health educator. Similar to Burkina Faso, she met many women who could not make ends meet, yet they harvested and produced shea butter. Her fascination with the shea industry was solidified during her service. She decided to create a secondary project organizing shea butter producers and submitting a small grant proposal to get funding for training. The process of working with the women in her village sparked a desire to do more after her service ended.

In 2005, Ms. Wright launched Shea Yeleen International, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that supports women-owned cooperatives in West Africa, and provides training on quality assurance and micro-enterprise development. With a vision to develop an integrative and sustainable supply chain, Ms. Wright created Shea Yeleen Health and Beauty, LLC in 2012, a forprofit sister organization that markets and distributes high quality skincare products.

What Shea Yeleen has set out to do is nothing short of a miracle in itself. Not only is this social enterprise's mission to organize and train women in the villages of Ghana to produce high