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National approach needed to revamp nation’s cooperatives – officials

Sep 15, 2018 News

A cooperative, simply defined, is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratic controlled enterprise.
Moreover, cooperatives are institutions that have been known to help those within society realise developmental gains.
But over the past 30 years Guyana’s once-vibrant cooperative movement took what is being described as “a nose dive…it almost died.”
This state of affairs was brought to the fore during the work of a Ministerial Task Force which was set up by the Ministry of Social Protection to assess the compliance of those cooperatives in existence.
The Task Force was, moreover, tasked with compiling data regarding the amount of cooperatives within the various regions of Guyana and examine their functioning and non-functioning cooperatives to see their feasibility to the nation.
This was in light of the belief of Social Protection Minister, Amna Ally that “cooperatives are the way for a bright future for Guyana.”
But based on the report of the Task Force presented to the Social Protection Ministry, following the assessment of the Task Force, it was ascertained that although “many coops are still on the books, when we did the examination it was found that some of them are dormant.”
This is according to Mr. Ed Caesar who was tasked with chairing the ministerial Task Force and handed over its report to Minister Ally last year.
Based on the findings contained in the report entitled “Revitalization of the Co-operative Movement”, Caesar said, “What we did, we met every day sometimes from 5 – 11 hours. The task was to revitalise the whole coop movement…if you look at the register of coops that exists and that are functioning, you will be disappointed.” He pointed out recently too that some of the coops “could not have been revitalised or brought back to life.”
Moreover, Caesar disclosed that the report of the Task Force has caused a number of things to happen. This, he said, included efforts by the Coop Department to steer Cooperatives in the way that they are supposed to be.
To fast track this movement though, Caesar is hopeful that the services of the Kuru Kuru Cooperative College, will be retained. Caesar who holds the position of Chairman of the Board of Directors at the College said, “We are hoping that the task of working with the schools’ thrift society will get right back into the hands of the College so that we can train teachers.”
“Many schools have thrift societies but they are dormant,” said Caesar as added, “There are many schools when I did the chairmanship of that body [the Ministerial Task Force] that still have a lot of money in bank accounts.”
Also stressing the importance of cooperatives recently was Board Member of the College, Mr. Rollingston Robinson. It is his view that “there should be a national approach as to the way how we should move forward with respect to cooperatives, particularly cooperative education.”
“If you look at places like Europe cooperatives have done exceedingly well,” said Robinson. He however lamented that “the whole ideology behind cooperatives [here in Guyana] over the years have been defeated.”
He, however, noted that with the new thrust that Guyana is going into “I think cooperatives is really going to auger well… maybe some oil funding can be aside and can help the younger generation to really achieve heights especially in value added production because more often it is just a farm to market practice with respect to agriculture.”
But according to Robinson, cooperatives do not only revolve around agriculture but they can be used in any other business enterprise and it is something that should be national front.

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