SACCOS and members’ expectations

Abstract

The Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies (SACCOS) are financial co-operatives that aim at meeting the financial needs of all members men/women, old/young, rich/poor in particular, by encouraging savings and granting loans to the members. It belongs to its members who manage it democratically. They play important role in socio-economic development of members and communities in general as SACCOS enable easy access to financial services to people, encourage savings, create employment opportunities, support directly community development effort like helping community access to social services, stimulate growth of business, and improve members’ income as well as living conditions. If SACCOs are managed properly, it becomes possible to play such social and economic roles to the members and have spiral effects to the community development process. As a result, they will be able to achieve the social and economic expectations of members. However for some SACCOS as they proceed with their operations, they face various obstacles which prevent them from fulfilling the visions/expectations that people (members) and community at large. Therefore the aim of this paper was to analyse the internal and external factors that hinder SACCOS to achieve the expectations of their members. The descriptive design was used and the data used were mostly secondary being collected from various already documented reports, papers, researches and journals, and in some circumstances, primary data were used. The approach used in describing the findings was mostly qualitative. The paper revealed that the factors preventing SACCOS to meet members’ expectations are both internal and external. Internal factors are like; financial constraints, poor loan recovery, governance problems, lack of common interests, high interest rates on loans by some SACCOS, weak leadership and institutional capacity, uninformed membership, inadequate education and training, limited range of financial products and poor quality services, poor accounting and record keeping, misuse of funds and non adherence to co-operative principles. The internal factors identified include; competition, negative impacts of external financing, weak assistance form SACCOS supporting institutions, insufficient auditing and inspection, political interference and excessive donor dependency. It was recommended that to overcome these challenges and meet members’ expectations, there is a need to; promote SACCOS good governance practices, provide education and training, diversifying sources, increasing capacity and number of co-operative banks, ensure proper financial management and better accounting practices, keeping records properly and networking of the SACCOS