By Desmond Davies
London, Feb. 09, GNA – Cooperatives in Africa have come together in a bid to boost economic development on the continent.
Cooperation Africa was registered in Ghana in March 2022 and is a civil society initiative to encourage and support cooperative formation and development in Africa and its Diaspora.
At its recent virtual launch, the organisation’s Co-Patron, Dr Mohamed Ibn Chambas, said Cooperation Africa would “create positive growth and impact positively on the lives of African youth and women in particular, as well as allow small farmers to improve their market position”.
Dr Chambas explained: “Cooperatives will allow farmers to buy inputs more cheaply, and sell their produce at better prices.”
Noting that cooperatives would let workers own their own businesses, he added: “In short, cooperatives facilitate inclusive growth and development.”
Dr Chambas, who has just been appointed as the AU’s High Representative for Silencing the Guns, said there had been a recent renewal of cooperatives in Africa after they fell on hard times during the era of structural adjustment programmes on the continent.
He said that in the 1920s, the British colonial government in Ghana set up cooperatives to improve the quality of cocoa exports.
The system was so successful that by the 1960s cooperatives in Ghana were responsible for 40 per cent of the country’s cocoa export.
But he suggested that cooperatives should not be confined to agricultural production, pointing out that with the urgent need for overall economic advancement in Africa, cooperatives should be extended to other sectors of the economy.
Dr Chambas noted the part that black people in the UK played in developing cooperatives in the country.
“African people have played a special role in the development of cooperatives in England, since it was Africans from the Caribbean who set up the first credit union [there] in 1964.”
Dr Adotey Bing-Pappoe, Co-Chair of Cooperation Africa, said in his keynote address: “By
2019, out of 1.3 billion people in Africa, 91 million or seven per cent of the population were members of cooperatives.
“However, the global figure is about 12 per cent.
“Nevertheless, by 2015, cooperatives had created an estimated 5.1 million jobs on the continent.
“But Africa’s cooperatives tend to be small.”
Dr Bing-Pappoe, a lecturer at the University of Greenwich Business School in London, said
recent studies had shown that African cooperatives “do not have strong networks from the grassroots to the national level”.
He said that the cooperatives were not as autonomous as they should be.
“Also, the bulk of the people trained in cooperative affairs are not the actual co-operators, but instead staff of the government departments regulating cooperatives,” Dr Bing-Pappoe said.
“Those school leavers who are trained are not provided with enough of the support they would need to set up their own cooperative businesses.”
He expressed the hope that Cooperation Africa, whose founding members are businesspeople, academics and activists, would change things, being “a civil society initiative to encourage and support cooperatives in Africa and its Diaspora”.
“Our vision is: ‘a vast network of cooperative enterprises providing Africans with secure livelihoods and high standards of living and wellbeing,’” Dr Bing-Pappoe said.
“The first phase in our plan is to build a membership organisation of like-minded people.
“In the second, we will encourage members to join, or establish, cooperative financing bodies, in which they will be able to invest.
“Finally, these cooperative financing institutions will support cooperative formation and development,” he added.
Dr Bing-Pappoe said the focus was on cooperatives because “the vast majority of Africans work in the informal economy, with great energy and potential but in mostly micro and small businesses with low incomes in vulnerable conditions”.
He added: “We want to grow African enterprises in the spirit and practice of
cooperation for mutual gain.
“We believe that cooperatives of all kinds – producer, consumer, procurement, supplier, marketing – have many advantages, not only for individuals and household incomes but also for positive development outcomes within and across national borders.”
Dr Bing-Pappoe said that in line with the objectives of the AU’s Agenda 2063 and the African Continental Free Trade Area, Cooperation Africa wanted to enable Africans “to grow the collective wealth for Africa using the cooperative approach”.
This, he added would ensure “economic democracy, sustainable job creation, social equity, and inclusiveness in the Africa we want”.
GNA