Cooperative

Cooperative

A cooperative is defined as “an enterprise or organization owned by and operated for the benefit of those using its services.”(Corporation 2014) This business model is generally successful in the areas of healthcare, retail and agriculture. Two main concepts of cooperatives are profit distribution among members, and the opportunity for members to become shareholders and have voting power.

In Cape Town, one of our team’s main goals was to generate community involvement in the project. A cooperative was a great business model that our team could use to promote community involvement. Early on in the planning process, cooperatives stem from organizing committees. These committees are generally comprised of community members. However, our project team could have formed a committee comprised of the savings group, sponsors, co-researchers, and our team. This initial step would allow community members to become involved in the project from the start, which would allow us to engage them and keep them involved. Another advantage to a cooperative model is the democratic structure. This model is focused on equal distribution of wealth among all whom are members. This would allow community members to have equal opportunities and would allow them to voice their opinions on the operations of the cooperation. Additionally, cooperatives are often tax-exempt and have the possibility to receive discounts on goods and services. This could be extremely advantageous to our team and would allow products to be sold to community members for a much lower and reasonable price (Office).

As with all models, there are flaws in the cooperative model. One major problem with cooperatives is a lack of funding. These structures are generally built on a pooling of community funds. Working in such an impoverished area, the WaSH-UP facility had few funds to begin our project with. However, there are numerous different sources of government and NGO funding that our team looked into as a revenue source for the project. In particular, the Cooperative Incentive Scheme (CIS) in South Africa is a 100% provided grant for registered cooperatives (Africa). If the team was eligible, the CIS was a viable option for funding.