Burkina Faso

Association TON

Association TON is a cooperative of 2800 farmers. Many of their farmers grow mangoes and a large part of the cooperative's income comes from harvesting, drying and selling these organic mangoes for export. Each year, TON purchases thousands of tonnes of fresh fruits from the farmers and dry them in their drying station. The vast majority of people working in the drying stations are women.

Mangoes bring three fold benefit to the members of TON. The fresh fruit farmers and the women doing the processing gain. Then in addition, there is the Fairtrade social premium too which benefits the whole community.
The social premium is a requirement of Fairtrade and is paid over and above the Fairtrade price for the product. Its useage is voted on by the membership. In recent years, it has been used for the construction of a creche, health centre, new classrooms, the provisioning of medicines, the purchase of mosquito nets and the purchase of a photocopier.
Drying the mango is primarily women's work, and it provides them with valuable paid income during the 5 month mango season from April through to August, enabling them to eat well, get their children educated and to buy medicine when needed. The women also enjoy working all together. When the mango season is over, it's tougher for the women to earn an income but they all do their best with with a variety of petty trading.

TON run literacy classes for adults, and they also run an Islamic school for children. They also have a great theatre group who do educative plays about child trafficing, and about health and sex education.

Future challenges
Tropical Wholefoods team are actively trying to raise funds so that TON can install biogas composters at their dried mango producing plants. By combining mango peels and stones with human and animal waste in biogas composters, WOUOL expect to be able to generate biogas which can be used to heat the ovens that dry the mango. This will reduce the cost of processing the mangoes significantly whilst still generating excellent compost for the fields.

Sangare Ousmane (pictured above right) has 2 hectares of mango trees. He has been a member of Association TON for more than 10 years and has one 3 year old child. "Because of mango drying, selling mangoes works for me. Before it was only the ladies who bought for market and didn't buy much or pay well. They just rotted because there was no market. A few big traders would sometime comes by but again they did not buy much and did not pay much either."

TON Women. Madame Soma (2nd to left in photo to the right) sells chilled water at the market, Bali Alimatou (2nd to left kneeling) sells fresh mango and fresh milk from a calabash. Soulama Douefuba (1st to left kneeling) sells shoes at the market which are imported from Cote D'Ivoire. Madame Bado Marie (5th to left standing) is a hair dresser but she says it is difficult to earn money from this here because people are poor. It is better in Cote D'Ivoire. Madame Traore ( 4th to left standing) sells clothes in the market.
Madame Traore: "it is better working at TON than selling as you never know if you are going to sell anything in the day no matter how hard you work but you know you will be paid for the work you do here."

A message from Madame Traore to take back to people in England. "Buy our mangoes because they are good quality."

	Madame Traore and Kabore Salimata of Assocation TON

TON Dried Mangoes are Fairtrade (FLO) and Organic (Soil Association) certified.