The cassava production process

It is one of the most widely consumed foods in sub-Saharan Africa due to its diversity of processing and easy cultivation on both generous and infertile soils : the cassava floor. It 's production is the main source of income for the women of Zogpébimé. Bellow some pictures of each step of the production process which lasts about 1 day. Everyday women of the village are working together as a collectif to produce manioc flour.

The first step of the process above, you can see the women of the collective harvesting the cassava plant. They wake up really early to avoid heat and go straight to the field where they collect the plant. This process required a lot of physical efforts, they need to go to the field which is situated around 20 minutes from the village then collect about 40kg of cassava on their head to the village and repeat it 3-4 times until the expected quantity of the day. Everyday they are repeating the same process to earn a living. It is a really hard work, painful that can increase health problems.

The pictures above show the women of the collective peeling cassava. There are about ten of them to peel for several hours the cassava using machetes to peel it. Moreover, this process requires a lot of time and patience, they sort the best plants to grind them into flour. After several hours, they let the peeled plants rest to be able to grind it after. You can see bellow the process of peeling, when we were in the village, the collective was renting a machine who peel to a private individual. This machine was in a bad state, it was very slow which made the process even longer and became a danger to its users. 

This is why with ESDEV team, we decided to focus our main mission on the acquisition of a new machine for the collective of Zogbépimé. During our mission we created a crowdfunding platform that you can find in the following article. 

• Please have a look   Crowdfunding platform

As I explain bellow, those are the pictures of the cassava grinding process after this, the women cover the jars filled with flour to preserve the flavour of the flour as well as possible from insects and heat. After letting the flour rest they finalize the process by splitting up the flour one last time by removing the last bad grains and this is ready to be sold. Furthermore, afterwards this long and hard process the women organize a meeting with their customers. Most of the time they are selling the cassava flour to the traders of their villages but also to other foreign customers who come to supply at a lower cost. To sell it they are using a small container as a measure and shares revenues between each other.