- Youth are turning away from traditional cooperative marketing that fails to match their digital habits.
- Experts are pushing for cooperative education in schools to build interest and membership from an early age.
- Ageing leadership, limited digital adoption and control of key economic resources are shutting out younger members.
The engagement of youth in cooperatives in Kenya and East Africa has continued to be wanting, despite the positive economic revolution their involvement would create nationally and for individual entities.
Most cooperatives, according to research, continue to be dominated by elderly folk targeted by marketing and recruitment teams which control huge budgets, scarcely employing modern digital systems.
It is against that background that leading experts and scholars on cooperatives are in agreement that mainstreaming education on cooperatives in the school curriculum, at the early stages of learning, remains the answer to attracting them to the sector.
Various surveys by the Sacco Review have in the past revealed that the old-style printing of colourful brochures, banners, flyers and wall advertisements has been replaced by social media, under wide trending digital packages preferred by digitally savvy and educated young people.
Scrutiny of spaces where cooperatives hold exhibitions shows that brochures normally dominate the choice of materials availed to those attending the events, against a background where the youth prefer digital marketing outlets.
Although they are presumed to be attractive based on their colour and graphics, these normally expensive-to-produce materials eventually become litter in the grounds where the events are held, by the end of the events.
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Research by experts from various universities and backgrounds reveals that recruitment of new members, savings and share contributions are sometimes over-concentrated among those with guaranteed traditional monthly income backed by pay slips.
In various reports inside the Africa Journal of Cooperatives Development and Technology, researchers agree that failure to introduce cooperatives education at early ages of learning among young people in Kenya and Tanzania has led to their low involvement in the sector.
Led by Joseph Shayo of Moshi University in Tanzania and several Kenyan lecturers, among them Rachael Moraa Onyancha and Wilson K. Metto, the cooperatives researchers insist that education on cooperatives should be made mandatory for learners to encourage their entry into the sector.
Cooperatives education should be made mandatory in all learning institutions, and the same should cover promotion of digital cooperative education and the merging of the entities with other micro-finances to expand opportunities for young people.
The experts also indicate that there is a need for transformation of Saccos into convenient and accommodative structures, offering ease for attraction of the young to Saccos for effective engagement.
Meanwhile, continued control of larger percentages of key sources of income, such as land which hosts high-earning enterprises such as tea and coffee farming, by the elderly in various parts of the country has limited entry of young people into cooperatives.
Managements of existing cooperatives also continue to be dominated by Kenyans outside the youth segment, whose adoption of digital marketing and recruitment of younger members to the establishment all remain low and wanting.
By Robert Nyagah
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