Since late 2024, five West African governments, including Burkina Faso, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, and Nigeria, have banned or restricted exports of raw shea nuts, the base ingredient for shea butter used across the world’s skincare, haircare, and cosmetics lines. Nigeria’s version, a six-month suspension introduced in August 2025, has since been extended by President Bola Tinubu, with all exports now required to route through the Nigeria Commodity Exchange and prior export waivers withdrawn. Cocoa has followed a parallel trajectory, with Ghana and other producer nations moving on export policy ahead of Nigeria.
The trade data confirms the policies are biting. According to Julia Spies, Chief of Trade and Market Intelligence at the International Trade Centre (ITC), West African raw shea export volumes fell from around 72,000 tonnes in January–April 2024 to 30,800 tonnes in the same period in 2026—a 57% decline. The five restricting countries alone saw their share of regional export volume collapse from 46% to just 3% over two years, with their combined exports down 97%, from 32,800 tonnes to roughly 1,000 tonnes. Sourcing has consolidated elsewhere, as Ghana, Benin, and Guinea now account for 93% of West African shea export volumes, up from 54% in 2024.
For a beauty industry built on shea, cocoa butter, and other African-sourced ingredients, this is rarely a policy footnote but rather a live supply chain shift. To unpack why it’s happening now and what it means commercially, BeautyMatter spoke with Bernice Asein, founder and Executive Director of The Fashion Law Institute in Africa and Beauty Law Africa; Mohammed Hammouda, International Trade Expert; and Spies of the ITC.
The core economic argument behind these bans is straightforward. Producer nations are capturing almost none of the value their raw materials generate downstream. Nigeria supplies nearly 40% of global shea, yet, per Hammouda, “the revenue is below $65 million from a global market of $6.5 billion. This is a big gap, and it means Nigeria is doing the raw production while other countries or companies are making the main return from it.”
The bottleneck is processing capacity, not raw supply. “We have a major facility with 30,000 tonnes annual capacity, but Nigeria produces around 350,000 to 500,000 tonnes every year, so the difference is clear. One factory cannot process all this production,” Hammouda continued. Production is also dispersed across smallholder farmers who sell through middlemen, unable to store or refine the crop to export-grade standards themselves. This means that even before a ban, most of the margin was already leaking out of the country.
Asein framed the same problem in labor terms. “When you export a particular raw material, you’re exporting the jobs, [and] all of the benefits that would have come to the people who were making it,” she said. It’s the logic underpinning the bans. However, Asein is careful to note that it cuts both ways. Without the processing infrastructure to match the ambition, restricting exports doesn’t automatically redirect value home; it can simply remove a market small producers depended on.
Both experts flagged the same structural risk: These bans are being implemented as isolated trade decisions rather than coordinated industrial strategy. “We are so focused on trade policy now, and we are not thinking about industrial policy, and what that means [when] we ban things,” Asein said.
Her sharper critique is procedural. “A lot of times we just hear this has been banned, but who did we consult? Who were the people at the table at the time when this was made?” She pointed to a consistent pattern of stakeholders—the businesses and farmers most exposed—being absent from policy design, with beauty-specific interests often folded indiscriminately into broader manufacturing associations that don’t understand the sector’s needs.
That governance gap has a measurable consequence, including leakage into informal trade. Citing a 2014 study, Hammouda pointed out that “some traders in Kebbi, Kwara, and Niger were selling through Benin because the prices were better and taking the product to Lagos was expensive”—well before the current ban existed. Restrict the formal export channel without addressing that price differential, and the same trade simply continues off the books, with Nigeria losing recorded revenue while the product reappears in trade statistics as Beninese.
Spies’ ITC data lent some support to this dynamic at a regional level. The sharp rise in Ghana, Benin, and Guinea’s combined export share coincides almost exactly with the restricting countries’ collapse, although she is careful to caveat that “these figures cannot tell us how much of the change was caused by the restrictions themselves, as production, prices and other market conditions may also have played a role,” adding that the shift “suggest[s] that international buyers have shifted sourcing towards other West African suppliers, although not sufficiently to offset the overall contraction in export volumes.”
Countries like Burkina Faso offer a middle-ground template worth watching, though. Rather than a blanket ban, it introduced restrictions but later allowed exports under special authorization, requiring at least 25% of the volume to remain domestic, alongside an export levy, a flexible model acknowledging that local processors can’t absorb 100% of the supply overnight.
This is where the policy’s success or failure will ultimately be decided. Nigerian processing plants are currently running at just 35% to 50% of installed capacity, according to Hammouda. This figure undercuts the case for banning exports before fixing utilization. “Why are the factories already there not working at 80% or 90%? Maybe it is power, finance, maintenance, lack of buyers, or the quality of the material they receive,” he said, arguing that the fix requires banking systems, logistics, legal infrastructure, and working capital for factories to buy shea during its seasonal harvest window, not just more factories.
Asein extended the capacity question to the consumer side, arguing that a “Made in Nigeria” push cannot work without trust and standardization. “I look at a ‘Made in Nigeria’ product, and I think, ‘won’t it bleach my skin? Have they done the right testing? Do they have the right certification?’” Her prescription is industry self-organization, some sort of unified beauty council, modeled on bodies like the British Beauty Council, built by stakeholders rather than waiting on the government. “The government is too busy. We have to do the work for them.”
Hammouda’s benchmarks for the next 12 to 24 months give the industry concrete numbers to track, including whether farmgate prices and unsold stock levels improve, whether the 30,000-tonne processing facility approaches full-capacity output, and whether Nigeria’s shea revenue rises meaningfully above the current sub-$65 million baseline. Cross-border volumes into Benin and neighboring markets remain a key tell. A drop in official exports that isn’t matched by a rise in domestic processing volume would confirm that trade has simply gone underground rather than upstream.
As he puts it, “if the government reports more processed exports but the farmer receives less money, then the value has only moved from the farmer to the factory,” not into the country's economy at large. For beauty brands sourcing from West Africa, the message is clear: This is a supply chain risk to model and assess now, not a policy footnote to revisit later.