By Malachi Motano
The cooperative sector in Kenya celebrates several milestones recorded in the last one year despite many factors that challenged the economic environment including drought, locust outbreaks crowned by Covid -19 pandemic. Cooperative Commissioner Geoffrey Njang’ombe gave the exclusive highlights to Sacco Review as the country join the rest in the world in marking the international day of cooperatives locally referred to as Ushirika Day.
Coffee reforms
By the same time last year, the state department of cooperatives (SDC) had piloted digitization of the 25 factories led in the major coffee growing zones.
We provided some systems thus weighing scales and computer applications that captured member’s information that can now be shared by the SDC and Counties as well as other sectorial stakeholder. We (SDC) now gone ahead to bring on board 200 factories and will be giving them digital weighing scales, and the computer applications and of course we shall supply them with equipment.
SDC is also modernising the previous 25 factories by giving them modern metallic coffee drying tables that are more durable than the wooden which are normally spoiled by termites. It is also giving solar security system and also CCTV to the 25 of them which have enjoyed the digital system.
We are currently doing registration of farmers where all farmers’ bio data is captured for the 25 factories. We are also carrying out audits. The other time we did 52 performance audits of 52 cooperative societies and 16 unions but this year we have done about 300 performance audits of cooperatives.
The department has done feasibility study, for PAVI-PAVI Cooperative in Kwale, we have done the feasibility study and if we get the funds, we intend to establish a ginnery which will cost about Kshs 300m. Currently we don’t have those funs but we have done the feasibility study and the documentation.
Cooperative policy
The department has also been working on the National cooperative policy which was validated by the stakeholders and is currently before parliament. It had been approved by the cabinet and awaits discussion at the national assembly.
We have a team, a taskforce that was appointed by the Cabinet Secretary (PS) Peter Munya to implement the national cooperative policy. The team is in place and is working and with that we expect to come up with the bill. One of the outputs is a bill to review cooperative registration both the cooperative act and the Sacco act. This work should be completed anytime it is just because of funds but we anticipated completing it by the end of this month.
SDC has held stakeholders meeting –engagement, we had one in Amboseli and another one in Maasai Mara to expose all the cooperatives on what is contained in the national cooperative policy. Once we are through with the draft, we shall also engage them
Sacco sub-sector
SDC has come up with a policy –Central Liquidity and Shared Services Facility which will enable Saccos to eventually have a common ICT platform where they can share and it will be more economical.
Saccos are coming together, already about 52 are on board, this will eventually allow them to also participate in the central payment system. Once Saccos are able to pul their resources together, they will be able to borrow or inter-lend to each other just like central bank
This we have already done, we have the policy and the guidelines in place and even for the bylaws. The facility will be a Sacco. It will be a secondary Sacco formed by primary Saccos. We are starting with the DTS- deposit taking Saccos.
The government had formulated regulations for non-deposit taking Saccos and now we are implementing them. The regulations are now in force after we came up with the guidelines of implementation in January and the Saccos have up to June 30 this year to comply.
These are Saccos with 100 million deposits, and the Saccos that recruit their members exclusively on their virtual platform.
Governance
We have been advising different Saccos where there is a problem on the right policies to put in place especially when Saccos have problems with management, misappropriation of fund
Dairy sector
The department has continued with the modernization of the New KCC which deals mainly with dairy cooperatives. Today, milk prices have picked from Kshs 30 -33 to now Ksh 40.
The sector continues to struggle to see co-operators live within the spirit of cooperatives where they pull their resources together and grow without leaving anyone behind
