When Lucy Everlyn Atim returned to northern Uganda after six years working in refugee settlements in South Sudan, she was not looking for a business idea. She was looking for a tree.
Growing up, the shea tree, known locally as moyao, was part of her childhood world.
It was where she and her friends gathered before school to eat its sweet fruit, and it stood as a quiet symbol of memory, belonging, and community. When she came home and found that the tree had been cut down for charcoal, something shifted in her.
It was not just one tree. Across northern Uganda, the indigenous shea population has been disappearing as households, facing limited energy options, turn to charcoal production to survive. What was once a familiar part of the landscape has become one more casualty of poverty, environmental pressure, and unchecked deforestation.
For Atim, the loss was deeply personal. “I got concerned,” she later told Al Jazeera. “The destruction of shea trees is alarming. These trees need to be protected, but people also need an alternative source of fuel.”
That tension, between conservation and survival, would become the starting point for her work.
Finding possibility in waste
The answer had been waiting in her memory all along.
Years earlier, while serving as a child rights activist in Yida refugee settlement in South Sudan, Atim had met a woman making cooking briquettes from discarded shea husks, the outer shells left behind after processing shea nuts into butter. What many people saw as waste, she saw as a possibility.
“If this works here,” she remembers thinking, “why can’t it work back home?”
In 2023, she turned that idea into the Moyao Africa Initiative, a social enterprise that converts shea waste into environmentally friendly cooking briquettes while creating income opportunities for rural women. The model is simple, but the impact is layered: protect the trees, reduce dependence on charcoal, create jobs, and empower women.
Building a women-led model.
What started as a practical solution has grown into a community-driven enterprise with women at its center.
Today, Moyao Africa Initiative works with more than 1,200 women organized into savings groups across northern Uganda. These women collect shea husks, process shea butter, and manufacture briquettes from material that was once discarded. For many households, this has become more than an extra source of income. It has become a lifeline.
“In most households, women carry the burden of finding cooking fuel,” Atim explained. “By training them to make and sell briquettes and shea butter, we’re creating an income while providing an affordable alternative to charcoal.” Her model does more than improve household resilience; it reframe waste as a valuable economic resource.
Among those benefiting is Catherine Akello, a mother of five, who says briquette production has helped remove the constant stress of buying charcoal while also strengthening her savings group’s ability to support members in emergencies. Stories like hers show that the initiative’s value is not only environmental, but deeply social.
Scaling the impact
Demand for the briquettes now exceeds supply, and Atim is thinking about scale.
To meet growing demand, she hopes to mechanize production with equipment that would improve efficiency and allow the enterprise to produce cleaner-burning briquettes at a larger volume. She also plans to expand shea butter production, which would create more raw material for fuel and open up additional income streams for women in the network.
But Moyao Africa Initiative is not stopping at production. The organization has established environmental clubs in schools across Alebtong District and partnered with Uganda’s National Agricultural Research Organisation to distribute tree seedlings. That work extends the mission beyond enterprise and into restoration, linking innovation with conservation.
A purpose shaped by loss.
Entrepreneurship is often described as the art of solving problems. Lucy Everlyn Atim’s story shows what it looks like when that problem is also personal.
She did not begin with a grand plan to build a climate enterprise. She began with grief, memory, and a refusal to accept that a childhood tree should disappear without a response. From that loss, she built a business that is restoring livelihoods, protecting forests, and offering communities a cleaner path forward.
Her journey is a reminder that some of the most powerful enterprises are born not from chasing trends, but from paying attention to what is quietly being lost.
In Atim’s case, one shea tree became the beginning of a wider movement, one briquette, one woman, and one restored tree at a time. Source Aljazeera
Also read:
From Coding Alone to Building a Continent of Women Who Code: The Ada Nduka Oyom Story.
