Cooperatives, the State, and Corporate Power in African Export Agriculture

Cooperatives, the State, and Corporate Power in African Export Agriculture PDF Author: KARIN. WEDIG
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780367660543
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Agriculture is a major contributor to Africa's GDP, the region's biggest source of employment and its largest food producer. However, agricultural productivity remains low and buyer-driven global value chains offer few opportunities for small producers to upgrade into higher value-added activities. In recent years, the revival of Africa's cooperatives has been celebrated by governments and international donors as a pathway towards inclusive agricultural development, and this book explores the strengths but also the issues which surround these cooperatives. The book scrutinizes the neoliberal ideal of economic prosperity arising through the operation of liberalized labor markets by illuminating the discriminatory nature of Uganda's informal labor relations. It points to the role of cooperatives as a potential instrument of progressive change in African export agriculture, where large numbers of small producers depend on casual wage work in addition to farming. In contrast to the portrayal, advanced by some governments and rarely questioned by donors, of an unproblematic co-existence of small producers' collective action and big capital interests, the author calls for a re-politicized debate on the Social and Solidarity Economy. As part of this, she highlights the adverse political and economic conditions faced by African cooperatives, including intense international competition in agricultural processing, inadequate access to infrastructure and services, and at times antagonistic state-cooperative relations. Supported by wide-ranging interdisciplinary evidence, including new ethnographic, survey and interview data, this book shows how cooperatives may be co-opted by both the state and corporations in a discourse that ignores structural inequalities in value chains and emphasizes poverty reduction over economic and political empowerment. It provides a critique of New Institutional Economics as a framework for understanding how institutions shape redistribution, and develops a political economy approach to explore the conditions for structural change in African export agriculture.

State, Cooperatives and Development in Africa

State, Cooperatives and Development in Africa PDF Author: Hans Holmén
Publisher: Nordic Africa Institute
ISBN: 9789171063007
Category : Africa
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description


African Perspectives on Reshaping Rural Development

African Perspectives on Reshaping Rural Development PDF Author: Mafukata, Mavhungu Abel
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1799823083
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
Development studies in developing regions such as Southern Africa rely heavily on materials developed by Europeans with a European context. European dominance in development studies emanates from the fact that the discipline was first developed by Europeans. Some argue that this has led to distortions in theory and practice of development in Southern Africa. This book wishes to begin Africa’s expedition to develop proper material to de-Westernize while Africanizing the context of the scholarship of rural development. African Perspectives on Reshaping Rural Development is an essential reference source that repositions the context of rural development studies from the Western-centric knowledge system into an African context in order to solve African-centered problems. Featuring research on topics such as food security, poverty reduction, and community engagement, this book is ideally designed for planners, researchers, practitioners, policymakers, government officials, academicians, and students seeking clarity on theory and practice of development in Africa.

Collective Courage

Collective Courage PDF Author: Jessica Gordon Nembhard
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271064269
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.

Theoretical and Empirical Studies on Cooperatives

Theoretical and Empirical Studies on Cooperatives PDF Author: Andrew Emmanuel Okem
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319342169
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description
The book outlines how cooperatives can be used as a tool for development and reconciliation in post-conflict contexts. This book also examines the successes and challenges for emerging and existing cooperatives in Africa, while delivering both practical lessons and insights into the theory. It presents completely new materials on the cooperative movement, against a backdrop of increasing global recognition of the roles of cooperatives and collective action in socio-economic development. Readers are invited to consider how, as an economic model that seeks to advance member collective interests, cooperatives are invaluable tools for human, economic and social development. Social and human geographers find this a remarkably impactful contribution to the literature surrounding cooperatives in Africa and cooperative theory in general. Policy experts and students also find the research informative and insightful.

Cooperative Enterprises Build a Better World

Cooperative Enterprises Build a Better World PDF Author: International Labour Organization
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789221262077
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
Explores the underlying rationale for the approach adopted by the COOPAfrica, a regional technical programme established by the ILO in October 2007, and highlights innovative features in the process of setting up and implementing phase 1 of the programme (2007-2010).

Rural Cooperation

Rural Cooperation PDF Author: F. F. Lyimo
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 998708155X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
'No person, no country in the world, irrespective of its stage of development, is fully self-sufficient. Cooperation brings together peoples and nations and facilitates peaceful co-existence.' So begins Rural Cooperation In The Cooperative Movement In Tanzania, what will undoubtedly be seen as a seminal work in the field. The author has lectured a course on Rural Cooperation in Tanzania at the University of Dar es Salaam for seven consecutive years, but lack of appropriate books with adequate coverage of the course content obliged him to conduct extensive research on cooperation and cooperatives. The resulting book covers the entire field and addresses the subject by providing a foundation on which wider study can be based. It is intended to make its readers aware of the strategies and challenges of cooperation and has a wider relevance, as it will be useful to policy makers in the cooperative sector, which is a significant part of the private sector in Tanzania, and indeed in most African countries. By June 2008, there were 2614 agricultural marketing cooperative societies, 4780 savings and credits cooperative societies, 71 livestock cooperative societies, 129 fishing cooperative societies, 11 housing cooperative societies, 3 mining cooperative societies, 185 industrial cooperative societies, 98 water irrigation cooperative societies, 4 transport cooperative societies, 103 consumer cooperative societies, and 553 service and other cooperative societies; perfectly illustrative of the movement's scope and the need to pay it careful attention. The topics included make it appropriate for use in Sociology, Rural Development, Marketing, Development Studies and studies in other specialties in the Social Sciences. From an exploration of the cooperative movement's various international iterations to a perspicacious survey of the history of cooperatives in Tanzania, Dr. Lyimo highlights the issues facing farmers and business people and illustrates the way in which cooperative effort- enterprises that put people, and not capital, at the center of their business- can not only improve members' economic power in bargaining for better marketing conditions and prices, but also to increase employment opportunities, thereby improving the standard of living for a large number of people. In these times of penury and economic disenfranchisement, this book not only fills the information gap, but provides, in the ultimate chapters, 'Procedures for Organizing a Cooperative Society', and 'Managing Rural Cooperative Societies', the basic principles and advice for those considering the cooperative model as the best means of improving their economic viability.

African Co-operatives and Efficiency

African Co-operatives and Efficiency PDF Author: Carl Gösta Widstrand
Publisher: Uppsala : Scandinavian Institute of African Studies
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Collection of conference papers on problems of efficiency in cooperative societies in East Africa - includes a summary of proceedings and recommendations, comments on cooperative legislation and dispute settlement procedures, and covers political aspects, sociological aspects, problems of agricultural mechanization in agricultural cooperatives, etc. References and statistical tables. Conference held in Nairobi 1971 November 29 to December 4.

Creating a Favourable Climate and Conditions for Cooperative Development in Africa

Creating a Favourable Climate and Conditions for Cooperative Development in Africa PDF Author: Hans-H. Münkner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Africa
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description


Cooperatives, Economic Democratization and Rural Development

Cooperatives, Economic Democratization and Rural Development PDF Author: Jos Bijman
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1784719382
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Agricultural cooperatives and producer organizations are institutional innovations which have the potential to reduce poverty and improve food security. This book presents a raft of international case studies, from developing and transition countries, to analyse the internal and external challenges that these complex organizations face and the solutions that they have developed. The contributors provide an increased understanding of the transformation of traditional community organizations into modern farmer-owned businesses. They cover issues including: the impact on rural development and inclusiveness, the role of social capital, formal versus informal organizations, democratic participation and member relations, and their role in value chains. Students and scholars will find the book’s multidisciplinary approach useful in their research. It will also be of interest to policy-makers seeking to understand the wide diversity of organizational forms and functions. NGOs, donors and governments seeking to support rural developments will benefit from the discussions raised in this book.