From Mali to you.

Keneya means health. It’s the name we use for our raw shea butter business in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and it’s also the name we chose for this line — made with shea butter from Mali.

For this first batch, we sourced our shea butter from Mali, working with Sanoun to bring in unrefined, high-quality shea for every jar.

I came to Keneya by a long road. I hold a PhD in Geography, and for more than a decade my research focused on West Africa — land use, public health, and the data behind how communities there live and grow. Long before any of that turned into publications, I was already running Keneya Cosmétiques, our shea butter business in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, so shea butter has been part of how I think about trade and care in West Africa for a long time.

Keneya is the next step — bringing that same shea butter tradition to the U.S., this time sourced from Mali, honestly and in small batches. I’m building this brand while serving as an officer in the U.S. Navy, which means it moves at the pace of nights and weekends, but it also means I don’t cut corners. Every jar is made the way I’d want it made for my own family.

A woman of the ZaA woman of the Zantiébougou shea cooperative in Mali kneading shea butter by hand in a large basinntiébougou shea cooperative in Mali kneading shea butter by hand in a large basin
Women of the Zantiébougou shea cooperative in Mali working shea butter by hand in large basins

Women of the Zantiébougou shea cooperative, Mali. Photos: IICD, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.