UCA moves to revive cooperative societies

Kampala. Uganda Cooperative Alliance (UCA) Ltd, an umbrella organisation for all cooperatives in Uganda, is on a move to revive cooperatives.
UCA, established in 1961, serves as the voice of cooperative movements both nationally and internationally.

It also serves as the main cooperative policy advisor for the government, implements various cooperative development projects and is mandated by law to arbitrate and help settle conflicts within the cooperative movement.

In the bid to advocate and represent the interests of the cooperative movements in Uganda, UCA carries out arbitration on disputes affecting cooperatives as mandated by the cooperative Act, and does capacity building in areas of leadership.
The organisation also oversees the management and using the recommended cooperative principles as well as cooperative sound practices - the cooperative ensures setting up village banks which had started as early as the 1990’s that later became savings and credit cooperative organisations (Saccos).

UCA also continues initiating the Area Cooperative Enterprise (ACE) model that gave birth to new face of cooperatives that diversified into other enterprises and off course being nearer to the farmers as opposed to old model of cooperative unions that were far a distance from the farmers and concentrated on traditional cash crops such as coffee, tea, cotton and tobacco.

UCA also oversees the putting in place of a cooperative linkage model. This is a tripartite model that links a Sacco to ACE/union and cooperative members, supporting cooperative formation into other sectors of the economy such as transport, energy, health, services and housing as well as the revival of the cooperative movement which had totally collapsed in the late 1970’s, 80’s and early 1990’s.

Youth and women
According to the Uganda Youth Survey report released in August 2016, Uganda is the most youthful country in East Africa.
The median age is estimated at about 16 years and about 80 per cent of the population is below the age of 35 years. Based on the current population statistics, UCA strategic focus has been on youth and women involvement in the value chains.
In 2016 alone, UCA conducted trainings of more than 52 youth groups in more than 10 districts of Uganda aimed at strengthening the youth business associations. The training aims at equipping the youth with skills and knowledge in business associations/organisations for their effective market penetration and growth.

UCA signed Memoranda of Understanding with key stakeholders including Uganda Coffee development Authority, Community Agriculture Infrastructure Improvement Programme and the academia such as Makerere University on the Africa Institute for Strategic Resource Services and Development and Makerere University Business School (PROFIRA Project).

Sustainability
Currently, UCA is more focused on a strategic pillar of building sustainability of both UCA and her members. To achieve this, the organistion will work on building the current good will of members and partners. To this end, they have had to conduct internal evaluation of how they work so as to inculcate the entrepreneurship mindset across the board right from leadership to the management staff of UCA and up to membership level.

The organisation, on its website, states: “We plan to invest more resources to expand the project and be able to supply more and other seedlings however, informed by the market.”
UCA has strategised to operationalise the cooperators agro-processing company. This is a business company for the cooperatives and increase cooperative investments for better returns.

They also want to strengthen the UCA capacity building, lobby and advocacy through agriculture mechanisation where cooperatives are supported to acquire machinery. This will see value addition and structured marketing by cooperatives as well as women and youth empowerment to engage in more lucrative economic activities.

“Our new strategic plans - implementation orientation therefore took an innovative approach where the thrust would be on strengthening the role of cooperatives in more viable value chains with the enablers being a strong entrepreneurship focus, strong focus on knowledge, institutional development, policy partnerships, women and youth involvement. We have renovated UCA building on Nkrumah Road to be able to generate more revenue for UCA,” the organisation says
They plan to invest more resources to expand the project and be able to supply more and other seedlings however, informed by the market.

UCA has also moved to make a strategic plan of implementation orientation. They, therefore, took an innovative approach where the thrust would be on strengthening the role of cooperatives in more viable value chains with the enablers being a strong entrepreneurship focus, strong focus on knowledge, institutional development, policy partnerships, women and youth involvement.

Achievements

Technical support. Owing to their excellence and incomparable results on the ground, UCA was awarded a contract by the ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries under the Vegetable Oil Development Project Phase 2 supported by IFAD to provide technical support to farmers to grow high value oil seed crops including Sesame, Soy bean, groundnuts and Sunflower in the districts of Mbale, Lira, Gulu, Arua and palm oil producers in Kalangala.

Membership. UCA was able to increase her visibility and membership that currently represents more than 3 million people in the country. It was also able to significantly take its space as “the voice of cooperators” in the entire country and beyond and as such they were able to attract more development support to execute our strategic plan.

Equipping farmers. UCA, with support from ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries under Agriculture Technology and Agribusiness Advisory services (ATAAS) project was able to carry out profiling of farmer organisations and high-level farmer organisations across the country, identified capacity gaps and developed training materials for the farmer organisations. The ATAAS Project is funded by World Bank and focuses on farmer empowerment and organisational strengthening for market linkages.

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