Cooperative profile · Chad · Lake Chad
Dihé Cooperative of Bol
Around 600 Kanembu women across nine villages on the northern shore of Lake Chad, near Bol. Wild-harvested spirulina (dihé), traditional sun-drying.
Members
~600 Kanembu women
Villages
Nine, near Bol
Product
Wild Lake Chad spirulina
Partner since
2023
Premium paid
+20% above gate
The cooperative
The Dihé Cooperative of Bol is a women-led federation of nine Kanembu villages on the northern shore of Lake Chad. Dihé is the local name for spirulina; harvest is centuries old here, and remains in Kanembu hands. Around 600 women hold full membership; many more are seasonal harvesters paid into the cooperative’s accounting.
Their process
At dawn, women wade into shallow alkaline bays and skim the green surface film with calabash bowls. The slurry drains through cloth in clean sand, then through a stainless-steel sieve installed in 2023. The thickened paste is hand-formed into thin discs, laid out on woven mats in the sun, and dried in 8 to 12 hours. Discs are then milled into powder or shipped whole as flake.
What our partnership looks like
- 20 percent above the regional gate price.
- 40 percent of each season pre-financed at start of harvest window.
- Stainless-steel screening line co-financed in 2023, replacing cloth-only straining and dropping microbial counts by 70 percent.
- Bloom-monitoring program, we co-fund weekly microcystin testing during the warm-water months when toxin risk is elevated.
- Direct shipping from N’Djamena to Albuquerque via Paris.
How we audit
Microcystin-LR is the controlling test on every batch (spec < 1 µg/g, WHO guideline). Each batch is also tested for heavy metals, total plate count, salmonella, and E. coli. We re-test the first lot of each new harvest window in a US-side lab. We will not ship a batch over WHO microcystin spec.