The Best Farmers Competition will once again have a special spotlight on agriculture cooperatives and associations.
Members of any co-operatives across the country are called upon to send their nominations to jkato@newvision.co.ug or WhatsApp 0789353585.
In this story, we look at co-operatives in Uganda. Co-operatives in Uganda can be traced back to 1913 in Mubende district, where four farmers decided to market their crops collectively.
They were known as ‘The Kinakulya Growers’. They co-operated as a response to the poor prices that Asian produce buyers offered peasant farmers.
A co-operative is a group of people who come together and associate to achieve common goals economically or socially.
The benefits of co-operating, including easy marketing of produce and access to credit, had been seen; hence more farmers joined to start their own co-operatives.
“In 1920, five groups of farmers in Mengo met in Kampala to form the Buganda Growers Association, whose goal was to control the domestic and export marketing of members’ produce,” Fred Ahimbisibwe, who works as a co-operative development specialist with the trade ministry, says.
Ahimbisibwe says by the 1940s, there were more co-operatives all over the colonial territory. A co-operative movement was thus born to fight the exploitative forces of the colonial administrators and alien commercial interests, which thought to monopolise domestic and export markets.
In 1946, a co-operative ordinance was enacted by the colonial government to regulate their operations.
According to the trade ministry, there are 30,000 co-operatives and associations in Uganda, serving about 5.6 million farmers.
However, many of these are either inactive or affected by management challenges.
Challenges
- Bad leadership and governance lead to making poor decisions. This gradually erodes the confidence of members in the co-operative and sometimes causes losses.
- Inadequate capital prevents members from undertaking large projects, for example, constructing modern storage facilities or value adding factories. Because of this, gradually members see no real value in the co-operative and some of them leave.
- Lack of access to reliable markets that pay competitively.
- Inadequate storage, post-harvest handling and agro-processing infrastructure, for example, large silos, which means that they sell off products early at lower prices.
- Massive fraud by management staff and committee leading to losses of members’ savings, revenue. Currently, there are cases worth over sh200b going on in courts involving fraud in co-operatives.
- High level of dishonesty and lack of transparency on the part of committees, which leads to disorientation by members. This may include declaring lower profit than what was actually earned, giving members a lower produce price compared to the market rates.
- Lack of member education in what is expected of them. This may be due to lack of interest by co-operative leaders to train members, poor human resource improvement strategies by the cooperative.
- Interference by the local politicians leading to divisions among members. Politicians use co-operatives to attract voters but, in the process, creating divisions in the group.
- Insufficient loanable funds to handle big demands. As membership grows, the demand for big money also increases. Most of the members stop at paying the registration and membership fees, do not save enough, but demand loans.
Tips for success
Create a co-operative based on common interests
- The memorandum of understanding must be agreeable to all members
- Transparency is key
- Bottom-up leadership; issues are discussed bottom-up before decisions are taken
- Avoid elective local or national politics
- Adhere to quality and quantities of produce
