NATURAL-BORN ENTREPRENEURS

Tran Thi My Dung hadn’t planned to start a shampoo business. “When I was a little girl growing up in the country, my grandmother and my mother always used to wash my hair with black locust,” she recalls. “But I’d forgotten about it until I had my first child.”

Like many Vietnamese women, Dung started losing her hair after giving birth. Chemical shampoos weren’t helping. So Tran’s thoughts turned to her own childhood, and how generations of women had washed their hair with the nourishing oil found in the seeds of the black locust tree.

“I started going round all the markets looking for locust seeds. But it’s very inconvenient for a busy mother to have to find the seeds and cook them up herself. I thought to myself that if I have this need, then other women will too.”

“I thought to myself that if I have this need, then other women will too.”

Dung now sells black locust shampoo and a range of essential oils, soaps and other products from natural materials under the name Nhien Thao, meaning “natural herbs”. The black locust seeds are harvested by hand, mostly by women, from the forests of the Central Annamite mountains, two hours’ drive from Nhien Thao’s workshop and retail store in Dong Ha city.

One of the places where Nhien Thao sources its black locust seeds is the village of Trang Ta Puong, a minority ethnic community with high rates of poverty. With support from WWF and MCNV, a Dutch NGO, Nhien Thao has been training community members to sustainably harvest and prepare the seeds, along with other forest products like soap nuts, natural detergent and medicinal herbs.

They have produced a digital map of the 180 black locust trees growing within the community’s forest area, each of which can produce 100kg of seeds, and are planning to plant more trees closer to the village. As Nhein Thao’s business grows, so does the community’s income. And this in turn gives the local people an incentive to look after the natural forest.