Shea nut. It takes a week to produce the medically-beneficial skin product. It costs an arm and a leg to get it to the market in Goakpara Nayire in Jirapa District of the Upper West Region.

All because of torturously bad roads.

For 50 pesewas or even 10 pesewas, this skin pomade deals with wrinkles, sunburns, treats skin allergies, sores, scars, dermatitis, psoriasis, dandruff, and stretch marks much better than well marketed polished creams in cosmopolitan Ghana.

Yet the commercial fate of shea butter remains dim - typified by the reckless felling of shea trees, an action which Head of the Shea Unit of the Ghana Cocoa Board, Mr Vincent Anchirinah is calling on locals to stop.

Ghana is losing revenue from this poor practice, he says. Nature invests 40 to 50 years to groom a shea tree to produce shea butter for the next 200 years.

A tree fallen, is two centuries of revenue gone bad.

Nature ought to be telling us something - there is more to the value of the tree than meets the eye. Mr. Anchirinah paints an inviting economic prospect - shea butter exports shot from GH¢10m in 2000 to GH¢120m in 2010.

In a hot morning, Joy News' Beatrice Adu is at Goakpara Nayire here in the Jirapa district, a small village about 45 miles from the regional capital Wa, to find out how folks overstretch themselves to produce an underestimated raw material.

She quickly notes, the best form of transportation is a motor bike because the dusty and winding road is very narrow.

It’s a predominantly farming community where maize, guinea corn, rice, ground nut and shea butter plantations abound. Most men drink pito,most children never step in a classroom and most women work and walk about nude from waist up - it is a tradition more than it's a poverty-inspired attire.

She meets 50 years old Goapkarama who takes her through the process of making the pomade popularly called 'nkuto'. The seed itself is brownish and the size of one’s forefinger.

The entire process takes about a week and Goapkarama has to travel about twenty miles to get her shea nuts milled as part of the process. When the process is completed, the shea butter is moulded to the size of a tennis ball and sold for just ten pesewas at the main market at Jirapa. Sadly though, many of the women like Goapkarama walk long distances to sell their produce and rarely make the profits they anticipate. The little profit they make is put back into their business, a living which ironically many people across the country and beyond benefit from.

In the U.S  there is an American Shea Butter Institute  with a 2035 vision " to create a multibillion dollar self- sustainable economic engine, localized throughout the international community, fueled by innovative products derived from the shea tree".

And in Ghana, setting up a board appears to be a bother.

But some Ghanaians are taking advantage of the product. A Shea Butter Cottage, is a Ghanaian-owned manufacturing company based in Sonning, Reading, in the United Kingdom, exploring the rich local natural ingredients that people often overlook to manufacture the skin and hair products.

Mrs Akua Wood 's business has won her three African Women in Europe (AWE) awards, including the Best Company and Most Innovative Person awards.

She says "every time I look at the trees, I see money" - confirming Mr. Anchirinah revelations.

But for indigenes in Upper West, anytime they see the tree they imagine a long torturous road to earn a few pesewas.