Establishing agro-cooperatives in Sudan to empower farmers

© ILO

Sudan’s widespread rural areas accommodate over 45 per cent of the country’s population with most people living below the poverty line and engaged in less productive agricultural practices. In addition to this fragile situation, the rural areas receive a large influx of refugees and internally displaced persons.

The PROSPECTS Partnership in Sudan aims to improve the access of host communities and forcibly displaced people to education, social protection and decent work. To support rural employment and livelihoods, ILO PROSPECTS works to improve agricultural practices in East Darfur (Nimir and Assalayaa) and West Kordofan (Keilak/Kharasana and El Meiram), the host regions to large numbers of forcibly displaced populations.

Mr Sean Paterson, Chief Technical Advisor, ILO PROSPECTS Sudan, said: “The ILO’s support is enabling small plot farmers to improve agricultural productivity through dedicated mentoring on good farming practices and provision of quality inputs, such as improved seeds, fertilizers, fungicides and hermetic bags. However, increased productivity is not enough to provide bargaining power to individual farmers in the market. We thus felt the need to invest in the development of agro-cooperatives which could empower them as a group to achieve their social and financial goals.”

Globally, cooperatives have been a champion of improving the living and working conditions of women and men, especially in rural areas. The ILO promotes cooperative development by working with the governments on inclusive cooperative policies and to build skills and capacities of locals to create and strengthen them.

© ILO

To begin the process of cooperative development, the ILO’s Think.COOP and Start.COOP training modules for people interested in joining or forming a cooperative were adapted to Sudan’s operational context with support from an international subject matter expert. Starting January 2022, the adapted modules were then used for developing a cadre of 20 field trainers through a national Training of Trainers (TOT) workshop held in January 2022.

“Master trainers from ILO’s COOP department capacitated field trainers in Sudan on the technical details of developing and operating a cooperative. These trainers engage with a diverse group of host and refugee community farmers, having different needs and capacity to absorb information. Thus, at the same time, we worked on improving training delivery capacity of the selected trainers,” explained Paterson about the process.