Northern Ghana is where the Sahara Desert is advancing. The drying climate is making traditional farming harder every season. For women smallholder farmers in the region, the range of viable agricultural activities is narrowing.

Ghana has the potential to produce 200,000 tons of honey annually. In 2015, it produced 10 tons and exported 4 tons of beeswax. The gap between those two numbers is not a land problem or a bee problem. It is a knowledge, equipment, and market problem.

Tilaa was built specifically for northern Ghanaian women farmers operating in a shrinking agricultural window.

It provides beehives, beekeeping training, cashew seedlings, and extension services — and guarantees a market for everything the network produces. Farmers get income from honey, beeswax, cashew nuts, and animal feed derived from pruned cashew leaves. Multiple revenue streams from a single investment in beekeeping.

The cashew trees double as a long-term bet: more flowers, more bees, more honey, more revenue. In 2025, Tilaa’s farmers also harvested rice — a new crop diversification that opened another income source in the same geography.

Tilaa aggregates honey, beeswax, cashew nuts, and other bee-related products from a network of 250 rural women farmers in northern Ghana, processes and packages in its own facilities, and distributes domestically and into export markets in Kenya and the UAE.

It manufactures and supplies concrete beehives to its farmer network, and has planted tens of thousands of cashew trees across the region — building the agricultural ecosystem that makes beekeeping more productive over time.