Role of co-operatives in achieving sustainable rural development

Abstract

Agricultural co-operatives have been regarded as important institutions for the survival of early and modern human- beings. The nature of agricultural cooperatives has been changing overtime depending on the socio-economic conditions for example in the 17th century we had the “reductions” established by the Jesuits in Paraguay, while in the eighteen century we experienced the emergence of modern Rochdale co-operative societies (Stikkers et al, 2011). The modern cooperatives were introduced in Africa by colonialists to serve their interests using the unitary governance approach. They had different interfaces that were related to the interests of colonial countries. For instance in French colonies we had the Sociétes Indigènes (later “Africaines”) de Prévoyance" while in British colonies we had the Unified model, whereas in South Africa and Namibia co-operatives centered on commercial agriculture that was dominated the rural areas (Schwettmann and Pardev,2014).The initial establishment of the agricultural co-operatives was guided by the need to search for better prices for small holder farmers in the marketing of agricultural export commodities, and hence accelerated a historical bias of not addressing other important commodities for small holder farmers. They were not like the Rochdale co-operative model and therefore had substantive implications on current agricultural marketing co-operatives especially specially on addressing exports and limiting demand oriented co-operatives. Overtime the content and structure of the agricultural co-operatives has not changed. The co-operatives have been centres of receiving international and government assistance rather than institutions of self-reliance. Agricultural co-operatives in Rwanda and Tanzania are yet to address the challenges related to both human growth and economic growth of its members in qualitative rather than in quantitative terms (Stikkers et al, 2011).