Local alcohol production
Sodabi, this very famous spirit in the west africain region does not have a healthy reputation. Only a limited number of craftsmens know about it's manufacturer in discreet area.
This beverage keep a great popularity in the Africain population obtained from the distillation of palm wine.
In Togo and Benin, it is known as Sodabi. In Ghana, it is called Akpétéshie and the Nigerians know it as Agoro. I got the chance to met a producer of this traditional beverage well known by the Africain community.
The process of production of Sodabi is really long and meticulous.
First of all, the producer need to extract palm oil from palms. He cuts the palms trees from the root and recover palm oil. Then he will heat palm oil with water so that the alcohol is not pure until it boils. Then the alcohol will pass through several pipes and finally filled with cold water in containers as we can see on the picture above to be cooled. After all he just need to wait the alcohol coming out from the pipes and collect it. The process can last several hours until the alcohol boils, we waited 4 hours the first time we went there.
"Distilleries are often located in the bushes and the manufacture of Sodabi keeps its character secret." (Afrotribune 8/10/17)
When you collect the Sodabi, the first liters are around 90° so the producer Attention sell it for medical use, then he collect around 20 liters for each production. Each liter sold will bring him about 2 euros. He sells his alcohol to customers who come only for its product to the village on purpose to obtain large quantities. Those clients most of the time are owner of informal trade really widespread in Togo.
You can see bellow my partner of mission Constantin, helping the women called "Tata" selling alcohol in a informal shop in Lomé. In togo 80% of the shop are informal which mean not known by the states, they do not pay taxes. Those informal shop are good sources of income for the population, they are selling cigarettes, Sodabi (left picture) and other beverage very popular in togo. With Constantin we were in charge of the monitoring of women's sales. Our mission was to analyse they sales for instance, who was their main customers, when were they selling the most in the day...
In this way, with the economic knowledge learned during our years at Neoma, we were helping them to maximize their profits. For instance in Togo, people are doing most of the time credit to buy product such as beverages, cigarettes... so Tata was obligated to give some credit to build customer loyalty. The fact was that she was forgetting who own her money so it impact directly on her income. This is why we advised her to write each time who own her money and how much, then she could avoid losses.