Newly formed Oil Palm Cooperatives Schooled on good governance

Newly formed Oil Palm Smallholders Cooperatives in the Southwest Region have been drilled on good governance in a four-day workshop in Buea organised by the World Wide Fund for Nature, WWF, in partnership with the Environmental Governance Institute, EGI, under the GHOA CSO support project.

Speaking at the opening session of the workshop, the Business and Industries Coordinator for WWF, Durrel Halleson said: “The workshop will go a long way to fight poverty in our local communities since its focus is on small stakeholders who are the major drivers in our local communities.”

Representatives from different cooperatives tabled their expectations which ranged from acquiring skills in good governance from the workshop so as to impact on their cooperatives at their local level; sustaining the health of their various cooperatives with the knowledge gotten from the workshop, and putting their members together.

According to Christopher Yumetoh Mubah, the representative of Ekondo Titi Oil Palm Farmers’ Cooperative, the workshop will help him to put his members together.He pleaded with WWF to come and educate his members to see the need of a cooperative.

“The members need proper sensitisation and they are going to go back and transmit what they have learned to other members,” he said.

The four-day workshop will comprise presentations on cooperative values and principles, cooperative management, partnership models in the oil palm sector, drawing examples from other countries like IvoryCoast, Ghana, Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as other aspects, to help cooperatives deliver on building triple bottom line sustainability.

As contained in the terms of reference of the cooperative governance workshop, one of the major reasons for WWF to engage in structuring smallholders into cooperatives is largely because, cooperative not only place at their centre human needs and profit for its members,butcould become builders of sustainability by pursuing the convergence between economic, social and environmental interest.

The Business and Industries Coordinator on presenting the objectives of the workshop saidthe overall objective is to build the capacity of newly created oil palm smallholders on aspects of cooperative governance to ensure that cooperatives become an acknowledged leader in economic, social and environmental sustainability in palm oil production in Cameroon.

Specific objectives include: the sensitisation of newly created oil palm smallholders cooperatives on the values and principles of cooperatives, sensitise and train the cooperatives on the different cooperative management models to ensure effectiveness and efficiency in delivering on their mission, evaluate the different partnership models between smallholders and agro-industries and seek acceptable models for defining a win-win partnership and create a platform to enable exchange of ideas for the different cooperatives.