Awa Sawadogo, who works for the Songtaaba Yalgré Association shea-butter trade group in Burkina Faso, never went to school. But she is a key member of the group, learning and using technology to produce a newsletter on association activities and the production of "bio" shea butter, which, thanks to the Internet, is becoming an important, money-generating export for women in rural villages in the country.

"My God! Ten years ago, I wouldn't have ever guessed that I would be writing, using a computer to produce a newspaper," she says proudly, answering questions in Moré, a local language. "But now, I can write in Moré, my mother tongue. I know how to create a folder, a file..."

Sawadogo is in charge of the Moré version of the trade group's newspaper. "For us women from rural areas, ICT tools mean learning and opening up to the world," she says.

Songtaaba Yalgré is an association of shea butter producers -- the vast majority of whom are rural women. Shea butter is a natural fat extracted from shea (also known as karite) tree fruit -- a plummy pulp that surrounds a large seed, or nut. Shea butter is extracted from the nuts and used in beauty products. The butter also can be edible.

The driving force behind Songtaaba Yalgré's Web site, created in 2004, is to give the 3,100 women associated with the group visibility, according to Noélie Ndembé, the head of MIPROKA (Maison pour l’Information et la Promotion du Karité, or the Shea Information and Promotion House), an affiliated project initiated to help train and inform shea producers.

"To be on the Net is to be seen everywhere in the world," Ndembé says. And that leads to clients.

The association sells most of what it produces through the Web site.

"In the past, we produced, but had some problems sell[ing] to the world. Now, 90 percent of our products are ordered via the Internet," Ndembé says.

Since 2002, Songtaaba Yalgré has offered products bearing the Bio-Ecocert and Bio NOP labels, which guarantee 100 percent natural products. The group exports items to Europe, Canada and the U.S.

To produce quality products, Songtaaba Yalgré members use GPS technology to calculate and track the location, surface area and the number of trees on fields, explains Marguerite Simporé, a GPS technology teacher at Songtaaba Yalgré who was trained by a European expert.

Using the GPS technology, women track field data and collect the shea butter fruit that has fallen to the ground. After that, they fill out a form where they identify each fruit and its tree.

"When the women don't fill properly the form, we refuse to collect the fruits because we don’t know if the fruit is from our 'bio' fields," says Sawadogo. Villages such as Boussé, Boulsin, Saponé, Siglé, Gampéla, and Kombissiri -- not far from Ouagadougou, the capital -- have shea fields.

To produce "bio" shea butter and oil, the Songtaaba Yalgré women follow strict cleanliness, preparation and extraction criteria. The bio products are not allowed to have been touched by chemical waste, for example. Songtaaba Yalgré uses stainless steel material and thermometers to maintain and measure the temperature of tools that are used.

The restrictions, maintained by the use of IT, make for good profits. One kilogram of bio product is priced at the equivalent of US$5, while conventional product is about $2 per kilo. The profit margins on bio products are especially good. For example, the unprocessed fruits of bio shea butter are sold at US$1 for 2.5 kilos. The conventional shea butter fruit is priced at $0.50 for 2.5 kg.

This difference in potential profit margin price obliges women to invest in the bio, and thus learn the associated IT tools. Women can earn extra money by simply filling out forms correctly.

"If a women fills a form out well, she earns 50 [West African CFA] francs [$0.05,]" says Sawadogo.

Songtaaba Yalgré produces between 30 to 50 tons of bio product and around 60 tons of conventional shea product per year.

During the harvest, each woman can earn more than 35,000 CFA francs ($77).

"With my money, I bought a bike; now I can move easily to and from villages to collect my shea butter fruit and have a big quantity. Before, it was difficult for me to do that. I can also help my husband by buying clothes or food," says Simporé.

Around 2,000 women from the villages work with Songtaaba Yalgré to produce shea butter. With their product, some of them have become financially independent, proving the local saying that shea butter is the "green gold" for women in the area.