Cooperative movement in Guinea-Bissau taking baby steps

16 Jul 2015

Cooperative movement in Guinea-Bissau taking baby steps

4 July 2015 - The United Nations have commemorated the 4th July as the International Day of Cooperatives. According to the UN, the cooperative is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their economic, social and cultural needs and common aspirations through a common owned and democratically managed.

In his official message to mark the date, the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, highlighted that "cooperatives are particularly important for agriculture, food security and rural development. In the financial sector, cooperatives serve more than 857 million people, including tens of thousands living in poverty. The Secretary-General noted that there are about 2.6 million cooperatives in the world employing about 12.6 million people, which is a "huge" potential for sustainable development, he added.

 

In Guinea-Bissau there is no official data on of how many cooperatives exist in the country, but some of them work at local and national level in different areas such as agriculture, animal husbandry, education.

 

Rui Fonseca, program assistant at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Bissau considers that Guinea-Bissau is at the moment in a stage of civil society mobilization and “taking steps to a true cooperative movement”.

“FAO has been supporting both technical and organizational, strengthen their capacities in terms of leadership and management organization. For example the case of women fish saleswomen Association concrete in Cacheu and Biombo region who benefited from all technical support in terms of management associations and strengthen their capacities in terms of business management. ", added Rui Fonseca.

 

The agency for the promotion of savings and microcredit activities was established by the government in this last legislature in order to fight poverty in the country. According to Marcelino Costa, this agency, "it is a very strong and powerful instrument in the fight against poverty because we are granting credits to the most vulnerable people to invest in income-generating activities they want to do but for which they do not have financial resources, so we're here to help realize those dreams. "

 

The ARTISAL cooperative was established in 2004 to prevent a traditional cloth – ‘Pano Pinti’ – from disappearing and currently the organization has more than 300 beneficiaries. The coordinator of the organization, Mariana Pereira said that since its creation, only this year alone, with the new government, they were able to secure institutional support.

 

Micaello Biai, from the department of Licensing and promotion of private investment at the Ministry of Economy and Finance said that his service supports private sector companies and cooperatives to benefit from tax and customs exemptions.