Company Profile

Established in 2012, Star Shea Ltd. is a social business dedicated to commercialize shea nuts and butter directly supplied by the Star Shea Network, a federation of rural Ghanaian women involved in informal shea processing. Its mission is to empower these informal shea women producers and provide them with access to the formal economy.

To accomplish this mission, StarShea Ltd. has the following objectives:

• Reinforce and expand the Star Shea Network (SSN), a national association of shea producers established as part of the “Shea Value Chain Reinforcement Project”, a project implemented by PlaNet Finance and supported by SAP, the European Union and the French Development Agency, to achieve economies of scale
• Facilitate the production of premium quality shea nuts and butter through the SSN by providing the necessary quality control and training
• Develop sustainable market outlets and a market strategy to sustain the business and thus the livelihoods of SSN members
• Diversify and help stabilize the women’s sources of revenue by including shea nuts and shea butter to their income stream.
• StarShea Ltd. is positioned as a “reliable and sustainable supplier of economic quantities of consistently high quality, traceable and ethically sourced shea kernels and natural butter”.

StarShea Ltd target is to reach 35 000 women within 2018 to reach breakeven.

StarShea Ltd is a social business, ie the management is evaluated on:

• the capacity to increase women’s revenue on a long term perspective
• the number of women benefiting from the service provided

Job Description

•  Shea Team Leader
• Location: Field
• Office: Tamale, Ghana
• Mission Start: January 2016
• Contract duration: 1 year local contract

Job summary

The team leader is managing a group of five to ten Shea Coordinator attached to him on a determined region, he is coordinating their activities on the field, helping in any decision and operational issue.

He will coordinate and supervise the production operations in butter and the sales operations in nuts, by planning the activities of his team, organizing the resources, supervising the logistics, controlling proper spending of money for different transactions (payment of the women, renting local warehouses, internal transport loading, reception;, maintenance expenses, …) reporting to the Operation Manager and with the help of the Supply Chain Manager and the Finance team, ensuring that the goods are transferred to the client.

He is responsible for coordinating and supervising the certification processes in organic and fair trade in his region.

His target is to contribute to the growth of the StarShea Network, by recruiting new members and ensuring that the women of the network are properly trained to deliver quality products, increase the number of bags marketed through StarShea ltd, ensure proper buying and operation budget management in order to order to reduce costs and ensure proper butter production planning to fulfill timely client’s orders.

A. Managing the Shea Coordinators of his Region

• Organizing Shea processors into groups, clusters, associations & a network
  • Assess the size and structure of the groups of groups formed or recommended by the shea coordinators
  • Ensure that the recruitment is consistent with the growth target and take all necessary measures to adapt the size of the network to the target
  • Evaluate the autonomy level of the trained groups, and check the effective role of women executives
  • Coach the Shea Coordinator in the measures to implement to improve the group dynamic
• Capacity building of shea processors
  • Supervise the trainings, check the quality process compliance of the groups during nut and butter processing.
  • Advise and orient the Shea Coordinator to help him achieve better quality process within his groups
• Other services to enable women sell qualitative and optimized products.
  • Liaise with other partners on the field to facilitate access to credit from other sources (MFI’s, ..), to facilitate the shea processors & their groups to acquire any necessary tools for their business activities: protective clothing, mobile phones, stoves, roasters, …
• Organic and Fair trade certification
  • Participate to the training of the Shea Coordinators and supervise the scale up training of the women
  • Executes random inspections on the field during processing to ensure that the key points of the ICS (Internal Control System) are followed
  • Take all necessary measures and coach the Shea Coordinator in order to achieve the target set in the ICS
  • Maintain the documentation about the certified groups and controls the accuracy of the information provided by the Shea Coordinators

B. Organize and Supervise the production of nuts, aggregation and loading 

• Control the capacity of the women and check the pre-financing figures / delivered bags with the help of the Shea Coordinators
• Supervise the deals for local warehouses, security, material needed, executes random checks to control reality of costs / expenses
• Organize any pre-financing of nuts if necessary, supervise the disbursement with the Shea Coordinators, controls the balances and cash level of each staff in its team.
• Plan the nut collection sites with the constraints of the buyer and the women executives, manage the loading and transport cost to minimize them
• Organize and negotiate the transport of the nuts and supervise the delivery with the help of the Finance, Administrative and Supply Chain Manager
• Supervise the payment of the women at all time, ensures that premiums are identified, and CVs and secretary paid.

C. Organize and supervise the production of butter 

• Make sure that the Shea Coordinator provides him with reliable capacity figures and proper reporting
• Organize any pre-financing of nuts or operational costs if necessary, supervise the disbursement.
• Select the communities / groups who will process for an order and determines the targets and the time line with the Shea Coordinators. Make sure procedures are followed : LPO’s, receptions, cleaning procedures, …
• Organize the transport of the packaging material, the nuts if necessary with the Supply Chain Manager
• Make sure that the target will be reached, take any necessary measure with the field team to re-distribute the volumes assigned to different groups/communities if needed
• Check randomly the quality process and coach the Shea coordinator in empowering the women executive in their quality management role. Control the collection of samples, the analysis and share the results with the team with recommended actions for improvement if need be.
• Organize the pick up from the communities with the Supply Chain Manager and organize the supervision of the container loading wherever it takes place
• Organize the payment of the women and collect the evidence of payment from the Shea Coordinators
• Makes recommendations based on the observation of the production processes on measures to increase women revenue and reduce their processing costs.

D. Implement Traceability System and reporting

• Centralize the data collected by the Shea Coordinator during the different processes, provides them with reports and data about the warehouses, the nut and butter orders …
• Coach the team in the use of the traceability tools, the smart phone and the reports
• Maintain the master data of the network in order to reflect the groups structures and capacity

E. Management of the team

• Sets monthly target for the Shea coordinators and check the planning viability with Operation Manager
• Ensures proper reporting of his team: daily basis on SMS / phone + weekly mail report    and reports with same basis to Operation Manager
• Follows up and check all targets and reporting, especially about involving monetary transactions
• Is provided with a budget by Operation Manager for field activities, and supervises the implementation according to the budget and trying to improve cost effectiveness
• Implement the right tools to motivate and improve capacity of its team on all field aspects
• Identifies training needs of its team, and implements specific coaching or training with Operation Manager

Reporting line

• Directly reports to Operation Manager

Management line

• Manages directly the Shea Coordinators, is responsible for the achievement of their targets, for their personal development and training, for their daily implication and motivation

Transversal lines

• For all administrative stuff: per diem, technical support, administrative questions he refers directly to the Finance Team and Supply Chain manager

The compensation will be in three parts

• Fixed amount monthly
• Variable amount, every month on KPI’s (to be determined yearly and agreed upon with the management)
  • Number of new women recruited
  • Number of collected bag per women
  • Number of kg of butter processed by women
  • Quality of the products delivered to Star Shea
  • Optimized costs: number of women trained per day/ trip cost
• Variable amount, yearly:
  • Cost optimization of women: checking the process and helping them find economic ways to transform butter
  • Increase of revenue of the women: nuts opportunities, butter opportunities, increase yield, increased part of the nuts/butter sold through SS Ltd,
  • Certification process success
  • Traceability tool usage
  • Quality of reporting of his team and himself          

Required Skills or Experience

• Level of studies: HND or BSc
• Languages :  local northern languages
• Driving license
• Capacity to provide a guarantor liable for 20 000 GHS
• Skills:
  • Managing strenght
  • Organizational strength
  • Thoroughness in handling money, handling documentation, reporting, monetary transactions
  • Communication and training capacity
  • Excell and computer skills