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Developing cooperatives in the Sahel
take the reins of international action
A network of experts in training and the organization of cooperatives is being formed in the Sahel and in several countries of central Africa. Inheriting a two-decade long technical cooperation programme implemented by the ILO and financed by Norway, these rural development technicians and teachers are the agents of real, ongoing progress in this area. The authorities of the countries concerned, however, must encourage their efforts and create a favourable environment for the organization of rural producers.
DIANTAKAYE, Niger - Mama Traoré straightens the ends of the blue, intricately folded turban framing his face. As soon as he arrives he is surrounded by crowds of villagers who call him by name and shake his hand. In Diantakaye, as in Kotoka, his previous stop, and in the twenty or so villages of this part of the interior delta of the Niger where he has helped to set up small-scale irrigated rice paddies, Mama is well-known. When questions or problems arise, they call on him. Whether it is about levelling the ground or irrigating the paddies, the choice of seeds, planting seedlings or harvesting the rice, he has taught the complete cycle to these impoverished, drought-stricken villagers. Since he first arrived on the scene, they have renewed their confidence in the future by organizing themselves in order to produce more and better crops.
Born in San, some 180 kilometres further south, Mama is an agricultural expert by training. He started out in 1968 in Timbuktu in the Ministry of Agriculture of Mali, managing 650 hectares of rice paddies using a rainwater irrigation system. But the drought of the early 1970s brought with it the need for a constant supply of river water. Various international aid projects were carried out, both to refurbish the irrigation canals, and to help the farmers and the people forced out of the north by famine to master the new irrigation techniques. Mama was involved in these projects, and over the years he became a recognized expert.
"Our first big success was in Diré, south of Timbuktu, where we were able to produce a harvest during the hot season," he said. "The farmers were novices, former nomads who had taken refuge in the region. Everyone predicted failure. But they proved to be very open to our advice."
"We came up with the idea of combining tree plantations with rice cultivation," he continued. "At first, it was to protect the fields from the burning hot sandstorms, by encircling them with bundles of twigs. Then we planted lines of eucalyptus. We noticed that they maintained a certain level of humidity in the soil. And since eucalyptus is a fast-growing tree, it turned out that reforestation with these trees could also be an excellent complement to rice-growing and would supplement the farmers' incomes..."
When Mama Traoré left Diré in 1991 for a new project in the Mopti region, some 50 hectares had been planted with trees. Since then, the technique gained widespread acceptance in every region of the Sahel where irrigation farming is practised, from Mauritania to Senegal. Mama's story is not just that of the professional journey of one man. Along with the similar paths of others, it illustrates the success of this ILO technical cooperation programme, implemented over more than 20 years in six countries of the Sahel (Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal).
The tool: A participative approach
The "ACOPAM" project began in 1978, as an instrument destined to complete and continue the food aid supplied to the victims of the drought by the World Food Programme (WFP). It was transformed several years later into a vast programme, "Organizational and Cooperative Support to Grassroots Initiatives in the Sahel". During the course of its five phases in the six countries of the target zone, more than thirty national land projects were implemented under the project, with a total direct cost of US$50 million, covered by the Government of Norway. Several activities were carried out in partnership with other participants and donors also.
These projects benefited more than 85,000 rural groups in more than 2,000 grassroots peasant organizations, which were most often associated with high-level federations responsible for the coordination of their activities. But the success of ACOPAM in fighting rural poverty isn't measured so much by the tons of grain produced, consumed or commercialized, as it is in the number and effectiveness of the men and women trained on-the-ground and capable of transferring their expertise to others.
In fact, the most important heritage of this international programme to the beneficiary countries is a new training tool and people capable of using it effectively.
"If I had to single out one particular thing from what ACOPAM handed down to us, it would be the quality and the coherence of its training method," asserts Latsoukabé Fall, an agricultural engineer who is Director of Agriculture in the Ministry of Agriculture in Dakar, Senegal. "In all of our countries, where the large majority of the population is rural, it is essential to see to it that the people have the minimal knowledge required to analyse their prevailing situations, develop individually and collectively, and elect to remain in their villages rather than emigrating to the city or to another country. ACOPAM was a remarkable machine which transferred expertise and furthered the organization of the rural populations."
Others, who benefited directly from the programme are no less laudatory. "I learned to read and write in my own language, Pulaar, thanks to ACOPAM courses," says a local elected official, a member of the new Rural Committee of the village of Madina Niattbé in Senegal. "I could never have aspired to my current functions without the discussions, the retraining and continuation programmes from which I benefited," acknowledged Issaka Ouandaogo, Chief of Production Services at the headquarters of UCOBAM (Union of Agricultural and Truck Farming Cooperatives of Burkina Faso) in Ouagadougou.
The unique feature of the teaching method developed by ACOPAM is the participative approach. "The basic programme, whose aim is to make farmers completely aware of their responsibilities in the management of their activities, is closely linked to the carrying out of their day-to-day work," an ACOPAM document notes. "The proposed methodology", the document continues, "rests on the principle that the training provided serves either to overcome a mental block, or to complement knowledge which experience has shown to be insufficient. This participative approach is far removed from the idea that all knowledge is learned from a trainer according to a pre-defined syllabus; rather, it transforms the trainer into a facilitator."
This applies particularly well to the Functional Literacy Programme (PAAP), developed originally as a tool for the management of small-scale irrigation schemes. Its objective is to enable the authorities and the farmers of the associations to master the elements of reading, writing, and arithmetic required to maintain management documents. This basic knowledge, in turn, provides them access to the skills needed to insure the daily monitoring of their activities; bookkeeping, calculation of taxes, tracking their financial situation, and maintaining a balance sheet and a total accounting of the running of the farm.
PAAP was later generalized to other areas. The theme and content of the basic training have been constantly adapted to the nature of the economic activity of the participants, their language, and the sociocultural environment. ACOPAM developed more than twenty programmes in this way, addressing small businessmen as well as farmers of small-scale irrigation schemes, members of grain banks, craftsmen, fishermen, truck farmers, etc.
Two Decades of Promoting Cooperatives
The principal areas of intervention by ACOPAM between 1978 and 1999 have been:
• Self-managed cotton markets (a decentralized form of collection in the production zones). Today these markets commercialize nearly 80 per cent of Sahel cotton production.
• Village cereal banks: More than 300 facilities of this type have been set up, which benefit close to 20,000 members in Senegal, Burkina Faso and Niger. The cereal exchanges between zones with a surplus and zones with a deficit, allow the former to dispose of their excess stocks and the latter to restock at non-speculative prices.
• Credit-savings systems have mobilized more than 400 million CFA francs for the benefit of 7,000 members of women's groups, enabling profitable economic activities to be launched, thus furthering local, sustainable development. Other support activities for women's organizations have been carried out, by country, in cooperation with competent national services.
• Small-scale village irrigation schemes: More than 3,000 hectares have been developed in Senegal, Mali, and Mauritania, and their beneficiaries (about 25,000 farmers) have been trained in rice growing and self-management of the plots, on which more than 500,000 feet of protective tree-planting and production have also been established.
• Land management: Village management committees were established to avoid soil degradation in certain populated zones (on the shores of lakes formed by dams, for example), and they have learned to master modern analytical and forecasting tools. They now take part in regional discussions of problems concerning land development and use.
Moreover, particular attention paid to health questions led many grassroots organizations to set up mutual health societies, to provide their members with dispensaries for basic care, and to create and manage village pharmacies.
The people: National expertise
Few technical cooperation activities have so quickly and so completely integrated the development and use of national expertise in their approach. Scores of engineers, teachers, and agricultural technicians in the countries concerned have been associated with the international action. Concerned that what they acquired in the programme should bear fruit, and to use the tools which they now had in their hands, it was quite natural for them to take over the programme when ACOPAM withdrew.
"The decision to create our NGO was taken in February 1995," recalls Amadou Cissé, Executive Director of the AFAR organization in Mali, of which Mama Traoré is an active member. "We were three national employees of ACOPAM until December of that same year, which gave us a transition period of several months to take over the portfolio of activities of the programme in the region."
Since January 1996, the new "Association for Rural Training and Self-Advancement" has had a partnership contract with the European Development Fund (EDF), by far the largest client in the area, engaged in a project to develop surface water resources. Until that time, ACOPAM was responsible for all training activities of the project. "This contract, for 200 million CFA francs a year, is the best startup gift ACOPAM could have given us," acknowledged A. Cissé.
But AFAR hasn't been relying solely on this windfall. "We are concerned about diversifying our services (training, support advice, technical and financial studies), as well as our partners...In fact, we play the role of a consulting firm." The current partners or clients of AFAR, other than the EDF, include international organizations, such as the World Bank, FAO, UNCDF (UN Capital Development Fund), UNIDO, and IFAD, as well as a number of foreign NGOs and various public or quasi-public institutions in Mali. Today, AFAR employs an average of some forty collaborators, of which around ten are permanent. The NGO has just bought the building which serves as its headquarters, in Sévaré, near Mopti, and is building an annex to house a training centre.
Other organizational structures of the same type have been formed in neighbouring countries: Wekré ("Hatching Ideas" in the Moré language) in Burkina Faso, GAMA (Association for Support of the Organizational Movement) in Niger, the Cooperative Training Centre of Bogué in Mauritania, FSD and the PRODEL Group (Strategies for Grassroots and Local Development) in Senegal, among others. At the country level, they have grouped together all of the current actors in rural development - service providers and organizations representing the beneficiaries - to create a framework for dialogue, exchange of experience and harmonization of their efforts. And, in order to further expand the possibilities of the exchange of information and technology, and to consolidate certain weaker or insufficiently equipped structures, the idea emerged to implement a cross-border "network of networks", which is now being built.
Escape from dependence
The initial aim of ACOPAM has been retained: To help attain self-sufficiency in food and to combat poverty in the countryside by training and organizing the rural populations, and to help the concerned countries move from a situation of dependence on international assistance in the rural areas, to a greater and growing autonomy, both in skills and material resources.
Skills have emerged and spread, thanks in particular to a considerable effort to train the trainers, and their dissemination of a proven methodology. The willingness of the trainers to help is impressive and the market is enormous; rural communities in the target countries still need literacy training, technical training, advice, help in organization, etc. Moreover, there is a nascent democracy in the region, and hope for a more equitable society (especially in the area of relations between men and women). This movement requires encouragement. The difficulty lies in linking existing skills to the potential client base. Rural communities are still very poor and, in large part, insolvent, even if their survival is not in immediate danger. Who will help them to underwrite the cost of their training and advancement? And what will the future hold once the support and advice structures which were set up come to an end?
These are crucial questions. The reply to the first one is, unfortunately, to state the obvious: international assistance in all its forms will remain necessary formany more years. The example of AFAR and similar national structures shows that the first users of skills in the training and support advice marketplace are the projects implemented by foreign operators. But the driving forces of AFAR themselves note that, "The services supplied to the populations are somewhat disjointed and at the mercy of the good will of the institutions which offer them contracts...It is difficult to respond to certain basic needs of populations constrained by the very sectoral benefits realized for the partners." In this respect, the hope is that there would be at least a minimum of consistency in the activities of the various organizations involved, and, like ACOPAM, that they would pay close attention to a smooth disengagement when they withdraw.
The reply to the second question concerns the role of the authorities in the target countries. The State should be able to devise a true rural development policy, which should aim to:
• Make training accessible to their rural populations, while respecting their priorities and encouraging their freedom of expression.
• Instill order and consistency in the system; unify and simplify instead of proliferating the institutions and procedures.
• Improve the skills and credibility of its representatives in the field, as well as their mastery of the problems to be addressed.
• Encourage training structures and private national supervision, without indoctrinating them, and insure that the public institutions working toward development use their services.
- Michel Fromont is a retired ILO official and former editor of World of Work.
Ranging from small-scale to multi-million dollar businesses across the globe, cooperatives are estimated to employ more than 100 million women and men and have more than 800 million individual members.