Shea butter, baobab, moringa, rooibos — African botanical ingredients have become the prestige actives of the global beauty economy. The brands capturing most of that value are rarely African ones. The legal and commercial frameworks that could change this are being built — but the pace of reform has not matched the scale of the imbalance.
The Numbers
$25.1B — Projected global market for Africa-sourced moringa by 2035, up from $9.7B in 2024. Source: Service95 / industry analysis, 2025.
$8.5B — Projected global baobab ingredient market by 2034, up from $4.8B in 2024, growing at 5.9% CAGR. Source: Market.us, 2025
142 — Countries that have ratified the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-Sharing as of 2024. Source: Covington & Burling / CBD Secretariat, 2024.
130+ — National ABS laws generated by the Nagoya Protocol over its first decade. Source: Covington & Burling, 2024.
<5% — Estimated share of resulting commercial revenue that returns to originating communities. Source: Original article sourcing; industry estimates.
Walk through the skincare aisle of any premium European or North American beauty retailer and the names leap out. Shea butter. Baobab oil. Marula. Moringa. African black soap. Kalahari melon seed oil. The ingredients of African botanical tradition have become the prestige actives of global luxury skincare, deployed in products that retail for prices most of the African communities who have stewarded these ingredients for generations could never afford.
Global beauty giants have used African-grown natural ingredients for decades, L’Oréal alone uses Burkina Faso-grown shea butter in some 1,700 of its hygiene, face, body care and makeup products. Business of Fashion The economic logic of this arrangement is not complicated. African natural ingredients are genuinely effective, genuinely differentiated, and genuinely in demand. The global beauty industry has discovered this and is acting on it with considerable energy. But the value chain from the communities who cultivate and harvest these ingredients, through the extractors and processors, to the brands that formulate and market finished products is structured in a way that concentrates financial value at the far end of the chain, far from Africa.
Understanding how that happens, and what would need to change to rebalance it, is one of the most important strategic questions facing Africa’s beauty industry and one that Beauty Business Africa intends to track with rigour.
The Commercial Stakes
The ingredient markets involved are not marginal. The global market for Africa-sourced moringa is forecast to reach $25.1 billion by 2035, up from $9.7 billion in 2024. EURweb The global baobab ingredient market — driven significantly by beauty and personal care applications — is expected to reach $8.5 billion by 2034, up from $4.8 billion in 2024, with the personal care and cosmetics segment demonstrating the highest growth rate at 8.73% CAGR through 2030, driven by natural beauty brands seeking traceable botanical ingredients. Mordor Intelligence
These are not cottage industries. They are billion-dollar global markets built on knowledge and biodiversity that originated in African communities — communities that, by most estimates, capture less than 5% of the commercial value their ingredients generate once processed, formulated, and sold under European or North American brand names.
Multinational brands are entering partnerships with African cooperatives and small-scale producers to source ethical and sustainable raw materials and this growing interest in ethically sourced African botanicals presents a strategic opportunity for domestic manufacturers to scale operations, enhance brand equity, and capture a larger share of the global clean beauty movement. Market Data Forecast But opportunity and reality are different things. The structural mechanisms that have historically concentrated value outside Africa have not been dismantled. They have been dressed in the language of ethical sourcing.
“Despite the efforts of some A-Beauty entrepreneurs to operate sustainably, there is often no way of telling which brands follow ethical production models due to opaque supply chains across the industry and a dearth of regulation in many source countries on the continent.” — Business of Fashion, 2023
The Bipocracy Question
The use of traditional knowledge and biological resources without adequate compensation to originating communities is the subject of an ongoing international policy debate. The governing framework is the Convention on Biological Diversity and its Nagoya Protocol adopted in 2010 and entering into force in 2014. The protocol gives each country sovereignty rights over its biological resources, making biopiracy illegal in principle. As of August 2025, it has been ratified by 142 parties. Wikipedia
In practice, compliance in the beauty industry is uneven and enforcement is limited. The UN-backed Nagoya Protocol was established to fix this imbalance by requiring permission and benefit-sharing agreements before biological resources can be used. However, uneven and unclear national rules have made the protocol difficult to apply — and some cosmetics companies now avoid using certain botanicals altogether due to the complex compliance requirements. Personalcareinsights
Over its first decade, the Nagoya Protocol generated more than 130 national access and benefit-sharing laws globally. All 27 EU Member States, the UK, Switzerland, Japan and Korea now have laws that enforce compliance by companies utilising genetic resources from other countries. Global Policy Watch The architecture, in other words, exists. What remains inadequate is the enforcement capacity on the African side, where the administrative infrastructure to monitor bioprospecting, issue meaningful permits, and pursue infringement claims in foreign courts remains thin in most countries.
A meaningful shift came in May 2024. More than 190 countries agreed on a new WIPO Treaty aimed at combating biopiracy by obliging patent applicants to disclose the origins of biological materials used in a patentable invention. Under the treaty, patent applicants whose invention is materially based on genetic resources or associated traditional knowledge will need to disclose the country of origin and if the access was not done in compliance with national ABS rules, the patent application may be denied. Covington & Burling LLP The treaty was signed by thirty states including South Africa and is close to the fifteen ratifications needed to enter into force. It is the most significant legislative development in this space in a decade.
Data Intelligence · The Ingredient Value Chain
| Ingredient | Origin | Global market trend | Value capture challenge |
| Shea butter | West Africa, Sahel Belt (21 countries) | Major cosmetics staple; used in 1,700+ L’Oréal products | Raw nut exports dominate; minimal finished product revenue stays local |
| Baobab oil | Sub-Saharan Africa | $4.8B market (2024), growing at 5.9% CAGR to 2034 | Personal care segment fastest-growing; value accrues to formulators |
| Moringa | Pan-Africa | $9.7B (2024) → $25.1B by 2035 | Global demand surging; African brands still a fraction of finished product market |
| Rooibos | South Africa, Cederberg | Hundreds of millions annually; GI protection since 2021 | 2019 ABS deal returns 1.5% of ex-works price to community trust |
| Hoodia | Southern Africa, Kalahari | Pharmaceutical and beauty interest; Unilever abandoned development | Benefit-sharing precedent set 2003; revenue never materialised |
Sources: Market.us (2025); Service95 / industry analysis (2025); Business of Fashion (2025);
South African Rooibos Council; WIMSA documentation
The Legal Architecture – What Exists And What Is Missing
Three overlapping frameworks currently offer the most meaningful protection available to African communities, each with distinct scope and significant limitations.
The Nagoya Protocol’s access and benefit sharing framework is the primary instrument. The BioInnovation Africa project — a partnership involving GIZ and industry bodies is working to assist companies in navigating the protocol’s rules through fair and transparent benefit-sharing partnerships, including a buchu case study that brings South African Khoi-San knowledge holders into a formal benefit-sharing model. Personalcareinsights These are encouraging precedents. They are also isolated ones.
Geographical Indications represent a second line of protection linking product quality and commercial reputation to geographic origin, preventing non-origin use of a name. South Africa’s rooibos GI, registered in the European Union, is the continent’s most prominent example. Kenya’s coffee GIs and Zanzibar’s clove designation are others. The category is expanding but unevenly, and GI protection is only as strong as the enforcement capacity behind it.
The AfCFTA Intellectual Property Rights Protocol, currently under development offers the most significant long-term opportunity, with provisions under discussion for collective ownership of traditional knowledge and mandatory benefit-sharing. Its effectiveness will depend entirely on how strongly those provisions are written into the final text and, critically, on what enforcement mechanisms are attached. Protocols without penalties are aspirations, not law.
Case Study · The Rooibos Settlement
In 2019, a formal Access and Benefit-Sharing agreement was signed following years of advocacy by the South African Rooibos Industry Association and Khoi-San community representatives — the first of its kind in Africa for a major commercially traded ingredient. The deal requires commercial users of rooibos to pay 1.5% of the ex-works price to a community trust.
It is both a landmark and a cautionary tale. It took more than a decade of litigation, the threat of European GI registration being blocked, and sustained government engagement to reach even this modest outcome. The 1.5% figure reflects the weakness of the negotiating position, not the strength of the communities’ claim. Rooibos generates an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The communities receive a fraction of a fraction.
Case Study · Hoodia And The San
When the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research licensed the appetite-suppressant properties of the Hoodia cactus to British company Unilever in the late 1990s, the San people — who had used the plant to suppress hunger during long hunting expeditions for generations — were not consulted and received nothing. Following a campaign by the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa, a benefit-sharing agreement was struck in 2003. The settlement established the San as primary knowledge holders entitled to a percentage of future royalties. Unilever later abandoned the project when the active compound proved difficult to commercialise safely. The precedent was set. The money never arrived.
“They did not steal the plant. They borrowed the knowledge — and then they patented it.” — Legal advocate, Nagoya Protocol implementation workshop,
Nairobi, 2025
The IP Dimension For African Founders
Beyond the traditional knowledge and benefit-sharing questions affecting communities, there is a more immediate intellectual property issue confronting African beauty entrepreneurs directly. Upstart African and diasporic brands are attempting to cash in on increasing demand for science-backed products while spotlighting African culture and ingredients but many operate in an IP environment that does not adequately protect what they build. Business of Fashion
A Nigerian beauty founder who develops a distinctive proprietary formulation combining shea and moringa faces the same IP protection challenges as any African designer or creator: registration systems that are slow and expensive, enforcement mechanisms that are limited in reach, and an international IP framework that was not built with African innovation in mind. The time and cost of obtaining meaningful IP protection across multiple African markets is prohibitive for most independent beauty businesses.
Trade secrets offer a partial solution — a proprietary formulation that is not publicly disclosed is harder to copy than one that is patented and therefore documented. But trade secret protection requires operational discipline around information management that many small and medium beauty businesses have not yet built. And it provides no protection against independent development of a similar formulation by a well-resourced competitor with a larger R&D budget.
The brands that are navigating this most effectively are those that have made brand equity itself the IP, building such a strong authentic story, community relationship, and consumer trust around their use of African ingredients that the ingredient knowledge becomes less important than the brand narrative that surrounds it. The use of native ingredients is not only beneficial to the formulation, it is an extra element of storytelling — these botanicals, known and cherished by African communities, add a layer of culture and depth to a brand that matters to consumers who say a brand’s values can influence their purchases. Business of Fashion Story, in this context, is a form of IP protection that operates in the market rather than in the courts.
The Beauty Industry’s Specific Responsibility
The global beauty industry occupies an uncomfortable position in this story. It has been among the most aggressive acquirers of African botanical ingredients — and among the most effective at marketing their authenticity and community origins to consumers while the communities themselves receive minimal benefit. Ingredient sourcing pages boast of West African shea cooperatives and Moroccan argan collectives. The supply chain audits that might verify those claims, or ensure that IP arrangements are equitable, are rarely conducted and even more rarely published.
This is beginning to change. The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, phasing in from 2026, will require larger companies to conduct and publish human rights and environmental due diligence across their supply chains. For beauty brands sourcing from Africa, this should in principle include scrutiny of whether benefit-sharing agreements are in place, whether communities have provided prior informed consent, and whether IP arrangements are equitable. Whether the directive will be enforced with sufficient rigour to meaningfully shift practice remains to be seen. The history of voluntary ethical sourcing commitments in the beauty industry suggests the gap between stated policy and supply chain reality can be wide and persistent.
What A Fair System Would Require
Legal scholars and advocacy organisations working on traditional knowledge protection converge on three structural reforms that would constitute genuine progress.
The first is a continental traditional knowledge registry, a publicly accessible, digitally maintained record of the traditional knowledge claims of African communities, governed by African institutions. Such a registry would function as prior art: documented evidence that a body of knowledge existed before any foreign patent application, providing legal grounds for challenge or invalidation. WIPO’s Intergovernmental Committee on Genetic Resources has been working toward international frameworks for such registers for more than two decades.
The second is genuine harmonisation of national IP frameworks under the AfCFTA IPR Protocol, with specific provisions for collective ownership, community consent, and mandatory benefit-sharing. The protocol is under development. Its effectiveness will be determined by what enforcement mechanisms are attached to the final text.
The third is capacity. Funding for community-level IP literacy, legal aid for traditional knowledge disputes, and public investment in African patent offices capable of assessing and acting on applications involving the continent’s biological materials. The African Development Bank and several bilateral donors have initiated programmes in this space but at a scale that remains incommensurate with the commercial stakes involved.
The Editorial View
The IP contest over Africa’s natural ingredients is not a legal technicality. It is a question about who profits from centuries of accumulated knowledge — and who is entitled to name the terms of that profit. The existing framework was not designed with African communities in mind. Reforming it requires more than the goodwill of corporations or the declarations of international bodies. It requires legislation with teeth, continental coordination with real enforcement, and a beauty industry willing to accept that “ethically sourced” must mean something more than a marketing line on a product description page.
Africa does not lack the knowledge to compete in the global beauty economy. It has been missing the legal architecture to protect what it already knows. That architecture is being built. The question is whether it will be built fast enough to matter.
Sources
South African Rooibos Council, ABS agreement documentation; Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA), Hoodia case documentation; Convention on Biological Diversity / Nagoya Protocol Secretariat; Covington & Burling, Nagoya Protocol 10th Anniversary Analysis (2024); WIPO, Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge (May 2024); Market.us, Global Baobab Ingredient Market Report (2025); Service95 / industry analysis, moringa market data. (2025); Business of Fashion, African Skincare Brands Head to the Lab (2025); BeautyMatter, Indigenous African Ingredients Take a Spot on Beauty’s Global Stages (2024); Personal Care Insights, BioInnovation Africa / Nagoya Protocol compliance (2025); AfCFTA Secretariat, IPR Protocol documentation (2026). Background context on African IP frameworks: Bernice Ofunre Asein, Fashion Law in Africa (2025). BBA Editorial maintains full editorial independence from commercial partners.
