Overall Description of COOPAfrica
The Cooperative Facility for Africa – CoopAfrica - is a regional technical cooperation programme of the Cooperative Programme of the ILO (EMP/COOP) decentralised to the ILO Office in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The programme was launched in October 2007. The strategy of the programme is based on an ILO preliminary research project – “Research for a Cooperative Facility for Africa” undertaken in Africa in 2005. The latter revealed that cooperatives in Africa are about to enter a phase of “renaissance”, but need a favourable legal and institutional environment, greater visibility, a stronger voice, further diversification, improved governance, better management, and solid horizontal networks and vertical structures.
Based on these findings, CoopAFRICA pursues the overarching goal of mobilizing the cooperative self-help mechanism and to improve their governance, efficiency and performance in order to strengthen their capacity to create jobs, access markets, generate income, reduce poverty, provide social protection and give people a voice in society.
CoopAfrica‘s initial regional focus of the Programme is in Eastern and Southern Africa; as the programme develops however, it is expected that additional countries and regions will be included. |
