Assessment Of Women Involvement In Oil Palm Processing

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY Oil palm, Elaeis guineensis is believed to be indigenous to West Africa. In Africa, wild palm groves are found mainly in a 300 to 500 hundred kilometers wide Western coastal belt stretching from Gambia to Angola and extending inland toward the East as far as the equator in the region of the great Lakes (Omereji, 2005). Oil palm is a perennial plant which belongs to the family palmae, subfamily cocoideae and are of three basic types (varieties) namely the dura type, tenera type and the pisifera type, (Opeke, 2005). Oil palm is a low land crop…