Bombali District Women selling jelly-coconut reveals “they’re ignoring its risk to upkeep their homes"

By: Alusine Rehme Wilson 

A recent study conducted by this writer indicates that the majority of jelly coconut traders in Makeni are Female between the age brackets of 18-38 years. 

Unlike the male jelly sellers who on a daily basis, hawk along the central business area of the municipality pushing wheelbarrows to sell coconuts, women carry on their head at least one hundred coconuts in either trays or large basins hawking along several areas in the Northern city.

This reality inflicts much body pain on the female jelly coconut retailers who mostly have to sell for at least eight hours a day and buy cooking condiments to prepare meals for their families at the expense of their health which prompted me to take my microphone to some of them to let them tell their stories. 

Their revelations about why and how they took up selling jelly coconut, the banes they undergo and its relevance are shocking. 38-year-old Kamathor Sesay who was born and raised at the Masongbo community in Bombali District, Northern-Sierra Leone is one of the women who has been retailing jelly coconut since 2008 says her late father never sent her to school and gave her up to marriage at age 15.

“I’ve been married for 23 years and now have four children, three boys and a girl. It’s from the profit I’m making from my jelly coconut business that has been bailing us out as a family. 

"It’s really painful to hawk all day carrying some 100-150 jelly coconuts to sell but I’m addicted to enduring the pain such brings because it remains our sole livelihood source and my husband has been paralyzed since 2018 which has even increased the burden of the family on me,” she explained. On how much profits she makes on daily, Sesay said she makes at least twenty thousand Leones-(Le 20,000) out of every dozen and she normally sells up to one hundred and twenty coconuts on a fruitful market day. 

Out of which she normally buys Le 10,000 pain drugs from the pharmacy whenever she feels exhausted. For 29-year-old Aminata Kamara, she revealed that she had wished to trade the jelly on a wheelbarrow like the male traders does but she admits she cannot afford to buy one and didn’t even know how to operate one to sell jelly but that she preferred carrying the commodity on basin to sell. 

Kamara who has been selling jelly for almost 14 years now reveals she’s a mother of five children, three boys and two girls and the profits she makes from her jelly trading is what she uses to buy cooking condiments for her family’s daily sauce. She further said that her husband is “a farmer, who goes to the farm to work every day and only provides the rice, buying of clothes and learning materials for our school going child is squarely rested on me to do from the Le 250,000 capital he gave me in 2009 to start the jelly coconut business.” 

Few other women engaged in the trade all of whom are residing in nearby villages of Makeni such as Mabanta village, Masongbo, Mapakie, Robin and Makarie village interviewed also said a lot more all of which reveals that “they are bread winners of their families, and that they’re engulfed to doing the business daily amid the pain and numerous risks evident in its process of buying and selling to upkeep their homes.”