News

Members’ commitment to animal feed storage construction

Chercher Oda Bultum Farmers’ cooperative union (COBFCU) in Ethiopia is one of the fast-growing cooperative unions. Currently, the cooperative union consists of 144 primary cooperatives with a total of 43,576 individual farmers.

The cooperative union has been a client of Agriterra since 2018. Its main activity is to market members’ produce and to distribute agricultural inputs and consumer goods to the members and non-members. Currently, they are managing numerous projects, including a dairy farm that, since 2021, has been receiving capacity-building support through the Agriterra-SNV-BRIDGE project. The dairy farm covers 20 hectares of land and has a total of 576 crossbreed cows.

Potato production training

By Hikma Sultan, business advisor Ethiopia

Zengena Irrigation Users Marketing Cooperative Union in Ethiopia started its operation in 2005. During its establishment, the union had 21 primary cooperative members, 6651 smallholder member farmers and 478,000 ETB in capital. Currently, the number of primary cooperative members is 29 and the number of member farmers is 8175.  The union capital amounts to around 4,346,876.90 million ETB. The union mainly purchases malt barley (grain & seed) and vegetables from its members. It also supplies agricultural inputs such as improved grain and vegetable seeds, urea and DAP (both inorganic fertilizers) and consumer goods to the members. 

Building climate smart cooperatives in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania

National consultation on Philippine cooperative bill

By Jun Virola, business advisor Philippines

Family farmers in the Philippines, including farmers, fishers and indigenous peoples, are the most vulnerable to climate change, natural hazards and calamities, as well as the vulnerabilities in the market. On the other hand, they are also key to addressing the nation’s food security, rural development and climate-resilient goals. But for them to play their roles well; they need strong and viable organizations that are well governed and managed, have access to capital, technologies and markets, and are fully participating in value chains.

Potato Week (15 – 18 November 2022 in Rwanda)

Promoting innovation and technology to stop the seed potato leak

The Potato Week is an annual event of actors in the Potato value chain from the Great Lakes Region. Supported by Agriterra, this is a space of celebrating achievements, exchanging skills, innovation, technologies, techniques, and ideas on potato Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) and marketing. The event started in 2010 in Rwanda and afterwards, this event got a regional character where actors from neighbouring countries such as Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Burundi and Uganda were joining. 

Member commitment can be influenced

Organic certification to decommodify coffee

Kawa Kabuya, which means good coffee, is a cooperative of smallholding coffee farmers located in the territories of Beni and Lubero, in North Kivu, east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The cooperative was established in 2014 with the support of the Belgian development organisation VECO (now Rikolto) to give services to more than 2,000 smallholding coffee farmers (average of 0.5 Ha) in agricultural production, training, collection and processing coffee beans through micro washing station and the commercialisation of green coffee beans to local and international clients.

The importance of involving youth in SACCOs

In Tanzania, many youths are not involved in agricultural and cooperative activities. This is due to the lack of agricultural and cooperative education when they are in school.