Growing up in Pajule, a rural part of northern Uganda, Simon Oola loved collecting shea nuts in the evening. At school the following day, he would snack on the mildly sweet fruit during lunch breaks.
Back then shea trees “were all over the place”, says Oola, adding that he would help his mother crush the nuts into shea butter for selling.
But nowadays, the 32-year-old farmer says “the number of shea trees is vanishing at a fast rate in the region, which according to him, is alarming.
“Our ancestors survived on shea trees”, Oola says. “We also did the same. But I’m worried that our children may not get the chance to benefit from these precious trees”.

Northern Uganda is located along the so-called ‘shea belt’ – stretching from the foothills of Ethiopian highlands to Senegal in West Africa – where shea trees are one of the major sources of livelihood for many people whose fruits and seeds are crushed to produce shea butter for cooking, medicine and performing cultural rituals.
However, there has been a rampant reduction in the shea tree population in recent years due to large-scale tree cutting for charcoal production. Northern Uganda is the commercial hub for this wood fuel, supplying neighboring nations like South Sudan and Kenya. Every year, Uganda loses 122,000 hectares of forest to deforestation on average.
The loss of these trees is majorly driven by climate change, experts say. Locals in northern Uganda, a largely agricultural community, are abandoning farming due to extreme weather –such as erratic rains and sizzling temperatures – and have resorted to cutting trees for charcoal.
“Our crops are dying because of the unpredictable weather, “says Janet Achan, a smallholder farmer in Lacekocot village. “This forces us to sell charcoal, and to do this we have to cut trees.”
Shea trees are particularly targeted in northern Uganda because they make good charcoal that lasts longer due to their high calorific value, or their wood structure is of high density in nature. That means more money for charcoal dealers.
But to protect these species, the government imposed a ban on shea tree cutting in 2018. Experts say this is critical since the endangered shea trees play a big role on our planet since they help create an agroforestry landscape across sub-Sahara and act as a carbon sink, meaning that they absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere than they release. The shea trees also provide vegetal cover that enables higher water infiltration and slows down forest degradation and desertification.
“Struggling to fruit well”
Now, shea parklands are struggling to fruit well in northern Uganda and locals are concerned. However, scientists attribute this to the extreme temperature that is causing flower bud abortions in female shea trees.
“Extreme temperature kills pollen grains in female flowers which prevent the shea trees from fruiting,” says Dr. Turyagyenda, the director of research at Zonal Agricultural Research and Development Institute (ZARDI) at Ngetta in Lira City, northern Uganda.
“And if they are not fruiting well, there is no pollination and their population dwindles in the end”, adding that many of the remaining shea trees are also old “which are less productive”.

A 2011 study by Makerere University indicates that there were 20 shea trees per hectare on fallow land but the number dropped to between 10 (young fallows) and 15 (old fallows) in 2017. Makerere University’s environment researcher, Patrick Byakagaba, says the drop could even be higher, given the scant data on how many shea trees have been felled since the research was conducted. He says the government lacks the resources to monitor the tree numbers.
“The other big problem is that charcoal dealers often uproot the whole tree, leaving no [tree] stumps to count,” Byakagaba says.
Peter Cronkleton, a senior scientist at the Centre for International Forestry Research, says in an email interview that there are also other factors such as increasing wildfires or bush burning that adds to the danger of the trees, not fruiting well.
But the dangers faced by the shea trees have also been impacting people in recent years. Among the Acholi, an ethnic group living along the shea belt in northern Uganda, shea trees have a sentimental value –and are even considered ‘sacred’. The cultural leaders believe the shea trees are not fruiting well because the ‘gods are angry’ since the trees are being extensively cut down.
The experts believe that environmental culture, like that of the Acholi people, plays a key role in conservation because it helps to instill fear in people by making it taboo for them to destroy the environment.
The Acholi cultural institution has also been working with various chiefdoms in the region to monitor the survival of the shea trees by instituting a network of informants. But this has not yielded much to save the invaluable trees from indiscriminate cutting for charcoal and money.
Ambrose Olaa, the prime minister of Ker Kwaro Acholi or the Acholi cultural institution, which oversees 57 chiefdoms, has been working with the environment police unit to educate the people on the importance of safeguarding the environment and arresting culprits involved in cutting down the shea trees. Under the 2018 shea tree ban, offenders either pay Shs 600,000 or serve a year in jail.
But Olaa says they are cash-strapped and cannot widely replicate their efforts. Nevertheless, he says, their informants are sometimes forced to rely on the fines paid by culprits to fund their work, including movements.
Grafting to revive shea trees
But the scientists at ZARDI in Ngetta say not all hope is lost as the parklands can still be rejuvenated. To do this, the researchers are taking more practical measures to protect the shea trees by grafting them into fast-maturing species that can mature in 10 years instead of 25.
Ngetta ZARID’S Dr. Turyagyenda says since last year, 4,500 grafted shea seedlings have so far been distributed to farmers in northern Uganda to replace both the lost shea trees and also older ones that are less productive. Grafting is the act of joining two plants together. The upper part of the graft (the scions) becomes the top of the plants while the lower portion (the understock) becomes the roots of part of the trunk.
The research institute is also educating the locals, especially former farmers who had resorted to cutting trees for charcoal to make money, on the importance of planting and protecting trees to maintain the microclimate in the region.
And as part of boosting their economic livelihood, Dr. Turyagyenda says the locals are also taught skills such as beekeeping, mushroom farming, and winemaking from shea fruits.
“The idea is to reduce the pressure that is being put on natural resources like shea trees,” Dr. Turyagyenda adds.