Learn what cooperatives are, why they are important for rural economies, and how to get involved in supporting them.

Nuru is pleased to join in celebration with other organizations around the globe, as we recognize the impactful role of cooperatives during the International Year of Cooperatives (IYC2025).

We sat down with Nuru’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Casey Harrison, to unpack what a cooperative is, why cooperatives are important and how Nuru-supported cooperatives play a role in addressing climate change. This interview concludes with recommended ways for individuals to get involved in supporting cooperatives. 

group of people standing outside in front of "Nuru Ghana" sign

Nuru Chief Sustainability Officer Casey Harrison and Nuru Sr. Impact & Markets Associate Bethany Ibrahim with Nuru Ghana staff, 2025

Before Championing Cooperatives: Casey Harrison’s Background

Question: Will you introduce yourself and tell me about your role at Nuru?

Casey Harrison: I’m the Chief Sustainability Officer at Nuru. I support our impact and our monitoring, evaluation, and learning activities across the network of Nuru local organizations that implement activities on the ground. I’ve been working with Nuru for almost nine years. 

man and woman kneeling down in soil to plant something together on a cloudy day in Burkina Faso

Casey Harrison and Noella Zmuda, Burkina Faso, 2022

I started off as an agriculture strategic adviser. That’s my core background and what I was attracted to about Nuru–the focus on sustainable agriculture for smallholder farmers, especially in remote, rural areas where services are limited. I also stumbled on a tree-planting blog written by my colleague, Matt Lineal, around 2015, and I was lucky enough to start in 2016 with Nuru after spending four years with the World Wildlife Fund. 

Casey Harrison and Nuru Nigeria colleague, Humshe, 2022

Q: What drew you to this work from the beginning? What’s your background? And why agriculture?

Casey Harrison: I grew up on a farm in rural Maryland outside of a town called Sparks, and I spent most of my childhood really enjoying farm life, rural life. Great memories of it–the silence that comes with the snow in the winter versus the crickets and the fireflies in the summer, having to do work and get up on Christmas morning to rake stalls for horses and carry feed hay to the fields. Rural life very much is a part of where I come from. My cousins still operate animal boarding and regenerative practices on a part of the farm, and they run a successful brewery business there. They’ve diversified their livelihoods.

I’m not a farmer anymore. I work to support farmers. That requires me to do a lot of research, but also stay close to what rural life means. We went through a period where my mother had to sell our portion of the farm because my father passed away when I was a boy, and I developed a negative feeling toward farming at that stage.

But then, I was at an impasse in life in my early twenties. I decided to apply to the Peace Corps without really letting anybody in my family know. I got into the Peace Corps, and I was like, “I’m going to go.” They told me I was going to a country called Zambia, and I had to look it up on a map, like the story goes for many Peace Corps volunteers. I applied to more than satisfy my own wanderlust. I wanted to do something. I had done some travel previously, and it was a wonderful and transformational experience, but something was missing–

The Peace Corps really attracted me to the opportunity to be of service. They sent me to a country I had not yet heard of, and Zambia became a very important part of my story, my passion for this work, and why I’ve been drawn to it for the better part of two decades now. The experience there rekindled my passion for all life. 

man planting tree in Zambia, while surrounded by children

Environmental education and Moringa tree planting activity at Cholensenga Primary School, Luapula, Zambia, 2010

Q: In what ways? 

You know, it wasn’t snowfalls on a winter’s morning, but it was the clarity of the stars and the Milky Way in the evening on a porch. It was going through the process of blistering my hands for three straight months, thinking I could farm with a hand ho. It was long bike rides through a protected forest that was simultaneously loved by the community, but also being unfortunately deforested at a rate that it couldn’t regenerate. 

man with bike outside traditional grass thatch and mud brick house

Casey outside his Peace Corps home in Zambia, where he lived from 2009-11. This is a traditional grass thatch and mud brick house.

There were things that were happening around me that I wasn’t really processing at that time, but I knew were super important both locally and globally. After the Peace Corps, I went to graduate school at the University for Peace in Costa Rica and American University in Washington DC on a dual master’s degree in Natural Resource Management. 

Q: And where are you living now? 

Now, my family and I live in Costa Rica full-time. Maybe I fall in love with places I stay for long periods of time. Costa Rica also has a long history of sustainable agriculture, a long history of deforestation and reforestation, and a complicated history with a green economy that’s been part of its economic growth pattern for the last 30 years. So, it’s a great place for me to be close to what I am most interested in, learn from different case studies, be welcomed and allowed to participate in different cultures.

That’s what brought me to the World Wildlife Fund after grad school. I was looking at environmental and social systems on a larger scale along with agriculture and markets. Then I found Nuru, and the opportunity arose to work with smallholder farmers in a more direct way, but also not too directly. 

Q: What do you mean by “not too directly”?

The Peace Corps taught me that the best person to be an extension agent in a rural community in Sub-Saharan Africa or anywhere else is a local leader from that community. They’re familiar with the unique local context in a way that would take someone else years to understand. If I can apply the lessons I learned on a farm in Maryland, on a farm in Zambia, and through my education to elevate and support those folks, that’s the right job for me. Nuru gave me that chance. So, I’ve been here ever since.

man and woman standing outside together and smiling directly at camera

Casey with Fatuma Nyanjong, former Nuru Kenya Cooperative and Market Linkage Program Manager

Cooperatives: What they are and why they matter 

Q: I’m thinking about the importance of those local leaders and leaning into local wisdom. The UN has declared 2025 the Year of the Cooperative, and July 5th was International Day of the Cooperative. I want to talk about the significance of cooperatives, but can you start by telling me what a cooperative is? 

Casey Harrison: First and foremost, a cooperative is a business. People often gloss over that because cooperatives do so much more, but fundamentally, it’s a business. It has to generate financial returns to cover the dividends it owes its membership, to cover its costs. And it has to generate a net profit to reinvest in research and development for new revenues.

My first experience working with cooperatives was in the Peace Corps, but I didn’t realize until later that they’re everywhere in my life. They’re all over the United States. They’re all over various sectors.

Q: Are there examples that people would recognize?

Casey Harrison: They cover everything, from electricity to finance, to your food cooperative that has a brick and mortar retail shop like in Takoma Park, Maryland, where I lived for so long. Electric cooperatives serve 42 million people in the United States. They’re everywhere. 

Where I was focused in the Peace Corps was in the agricultural and agribusiness sector. That was my first foray into beginning to understand their governance, the importance of trust, how they function financially, and the barriers cooperatives run up against in terms of accessing accounts and accessing services and loans.

two men standing inside a building next to a piece of equipment in Zambia

Casey visiting a hammermill for processing local flour as an income generating activity (IGA) in partnership with local cooperatives and primary schools.

They don’t necessarily operate on multinational scales of revenues or turnover. But they operate within local systems because they are representative of local populations. Cooperatives are membership-based democratically-elected entities that are also businesses. Those elected leaders in an agricultural cooperative in Zambia that trades in maize or in a food retail in Takoma Park or in an electric cooperative in your home municipality – they’re all responsive to their membership. 

Q: Why exactly are cooperatives so responsive to their membership?

Casey Harrison: They have to be because they’re democratically elected. That’s also aligned with the first and one of seven principles of cooperatives laid out by the International Cooperative Alliance. Cooperatives are extremely important, especially if you are invested in local economic growth because these businesses are representative of their membership, the people that use them and pay their dues and own the shares. Cooperative leaders have to respond to them directly, not indirectly through financial returns only or shareholder value, but directly through actual material change in their lives and livelihoods. 

Question: What do you think is the significance of the UN focusing on cooperatives this year? 

Casey Harrison: I think it’s important that we’ve reached that stage globally with cooperatives where they can be elevated to that level of importance. I think that it’s helpful to have the UN amplifying that message.

The real work with cooperatives happens on the ground, though, with the business development services that are delivered to them. Nuru delivers these services while building an enabling environment within a municipality in Kenya, like Homa Bay or in Baringo, or in Nigeria, where we’re working with the Ministry of Agriculture in Adamawa State. Nuru Ethiopia is supporting the government’s formation of a Federation in South Ethiopia Regional State to expand co-benefits to other cooperatives across the state. A federation is a group of union and primary cooperatives that bring communities and municipalities together to support commerce, infrastructure, and the supply of high-quality raw materials like wheat, teff, groundnuts, mung beans, and coffee.

The role cooperatives play in building trust, expanding commerce, and inspiring economic growth is the root of what makes this such an important year for elevating cooperatives. 

large group of people outside a building in Kenya receiving instruction from a speaker

Cooperative members from Baringo County, Kenya, receiving training on crop production, 2024

How Cooperatives Impact Members and Fit Into the Nuru Model

Q: And cooperatives elevate remote farmers who cannot access those larger markets–elevating them to this status where they’re recognized by their local government and then at the national level as well, right?

Casey Harrison: Yes, formal registration of these cooperatives is important for that to happen–being part of the government and private sector systems that support people’s ability to grow, to invest, to advance their livelihoods. It is vital, and cooperatives provide that avenue as registered agribusinesses in those countries. Cooperatives pay taxes and engage in other civil activity that supports social and environmental needs of their communities. Formalizing these cooperatives builds trust. Market systems run on competition, which is important for innovation and driving growth, but the long arc of human history is also built on cooperation. We can’t forget the importance of cooperation to sustainability.

woman handing man a jug of milk

Tisinya Cooperative member sells dairy milk, Kenya, 2022

Q: Nuru’s vision is this world without cycles of unjust poverty–a world where resilience and hope are being cultivated in marginalized communities. How do cooperatives fit into that vision?

Casey Harrison: There are very technical ways in which they do that. One example is with revolving funds. 

Q: Can you explain what a revolving fund is?

Casey Harrison: A revolving fund is the capital that is invested back into the business by the cooperative membership. Nuru invests this money as part of an early stage grant given to the cooperative and used to finance agricultural inputs for farmers who qualify based on a set of co-created criteria with the cooperative. This creates access to inputs that are improved and sourced from high-quality retailers and service providers. The farmers can take those inputs out on loan. Then, they repay those loans back to the cooperative, and that money stays in the revolving fund which continues to give them access to additional business loans that they repay.

It takes momentum to break cycles of unjust poverty, and momentum has to come in many forms–economic, environmental, social–but, in this case, the economic momentum is built around the revolving fund and also built around the money made from the commerce and the actual revenue generated from the aggregation and sale of more, higher-quality raw materials, like groundnuts and soybeans.

group of people standing together outside a building and holding an event sign

Esipe Dicha Cooperative Union Experience Sharing Event, Ethiopia, 2024

All of this commerce and growth depends on an active, informed, and engaged membership–the farmers or the pastoralists, those who are producing more raw material, more food, meat, and milk in surplus, by adopting new varieties of seed and feed that’s better suited for emerging climatic shocks. The impact of development activities like those that Nuru supports and implements through local Nuru NGOs relies on a cooperative private sector business that can carry them forward based on the trust, ownership, and active engagement of membership. That’s why we view them as the perfect vehicle for breaking that unjust cycle of extreme poverty. 

Q: There’s a lot of clear value for a farmer, but if I’m already farming, I might be set in my ways. I grow this particular crop, and I sell this produce to my neighbor. Why do I want to be part of that formal structure?

Casey Harrison: There has to be value there. It’s going to improve their access to goods and services that they depend on for their livelihood. It’s going to offer that in places where there’s not significant private sector or government infrastructure providing support or access. These places don’t have the well-established multinational private sector support or government extension services like those in Europe or the United States. It’s different in remote Kenya or Burkina Faso or Nigeria. Think about a remote rural farmer who is planning to produce mixed crops on two acres of land with a couple of animals–trying to support a family of five over the next few years. They’re trying to produce feed for the animals, food for their kids, and access other education and health services. They need to optimize productivity on that land, so they need access to certain technologies, and they need support to make important long-term decisions on how to manage that land. Most of all, they need access to trusted information. Most farmers want that, but where it breaks down in fragile or remote rural systems is that there’s limited trust in the information they’re receiving. 

group of women standing outside together and looking at a phone

Nuru Nigeria staff member explains the day’s weather forecast to women farmers, 2023

Q: How do you navigate that limited trust?

Casey Harrison: Cooperatives bridge that gap over time in all the ways I previously described which helps with behavior change and the diffusion of innovation. It takes time. It can’t happen overnight, but as governance, leadership, and financial management measurably improve over five to seven years, trust is built, and innovation follows. We have seen this firsthand in our work at Nuru. And, this is why we align our locally-tailored activities with ISO 18716–global guidelines and benchmarks for professional farmer organizations, like cooperatives.  

As local Nuru NGOs and partner cooperatives introduce new practices and technologies to growing crops, like new seed varieties, and other disruptive and appropriate technologies that are viewed as risks by rural households, we see early adopters move first. Once others see the results, the late adopters follow. Then, the innovation diffuses throughout the community. It spreads. Over time, these regenerative approaches and climate-smart practices that increase yields, improve soils, and build climate resilience–they just become the norm. They become common sense. 

And so the cooperative allows for farmers who may be skeptical or who have been burned in the past by short-term projects or inappropriate technologies. They can trust this system because they can trust this business to deliver on its promises, since they are a member and an owner. And that’s really a lot of what our work is over a five to seven year period of time. It’s about building up that trust through repeated action, repeated delivery, and repeated value. I’ve seen it happen with cooperatives like Hidota Union in Ethiopia. They’ve seen their business revenues go up over 800% in a seven-year period.

group of people standing and sitting together outside a building, cheering together

Nuru Ethiopia staff with Hidota Union members, 2023

There’s infrastructure that wasn’t there before in Zefine, Ethiopia. The union is accessing loans, and engaged in federation formation. It is really inspiring. We have case studies on this natural growth and the re-emergence of trust in communities where cooperatives are delivering professional services and value. Then, the rural community can trust the cooperative to deliver what they need. And that really, again, takes patience.

Cooperatives Drive Impact in Fragile Communities 

Q: As you’re sharing these awesome stories, I’m thinking about the fact that Nuru works in fragile contexts–places where extreme poverty, climate change, and conflict are coming to a head. It’s a challenging environment, right? 

Casey Harrison: Fragility is a broadly defined and complex term. We use the Fragile States Index to define fragility across a  wide spectrum of indicators. In terms of the places we work at Nuru, we use it to identify places within countries where we can work safely and do market systems development. We look for those places that are in what we at Nuru call the “yellow zones.” These are areas caught at a tipping point, between two extremes: growing conflict, worsening poverty, and instability on one side–a red zone, and then a green zone with the potential for peace and prosperity on the other side. So, we’re in yellow zones where it’s safe for our local teams to operate with vigilance and adaptive management techniques, but also go beyond humanitarian aid and dependency. Security comes from local and consistent engagement, and sharing information to make adaptive management decisions to keep people safe. 

Nuru map highlighting yellow zones where Nuru works

Nuru works in rural communities located within the yellow stability tipping point zone.

Q: What does it look like to determine that business is even viable here? 

Casey Harrison: Commerce and business are already going on in these yellow zones. It’s limited and highly constrained, but present. I mean, these places aren’t devoid of people ambitiously trying to become entrepreneurs or find a way out of poverty. There are people trading, selling things, bartering in some cases. You know, there’s a local economy that exists in those yellow zones. They’re not war zones. We’re not coming in and creating something that’s not already there. We’re helping something grow. We’re helping jumpstart the enabling environment around it and draw in more people to invest in those communities, cooperatives, value chains, and in those rural yellow zones.

Before we invest time, resources, and a long-term commitment, Nuru ensures that there’s demand for the type of support and services our model provides. We also have to ensure that we are delivering value and impact that’s measurable. So, very similarly to what the cooperatives need to do for their members. Nuru local NGOs and the Nuru Collective as a whole needs to deliver measurable impact. We prioritize that. We are accountable to our partners, our donors, and most of all, the local communities.  

three people holding a tree seedling together at a tree planting event and smiling at the camera

Nuru Nigeria Managing Director Amy Gaman with local leaders at tree planting event, 2025

We also have to operate in partnership with local governments. There has to be collaboration at that level to be effective and to inform the food system, value chain, and the agricultural system over time with the needs of those cooperatives and the members. The local Nuru NGO managing directors that I engage with weekly, have worked with for many years, and who I have great respect for–they and their teams maintain these critical local relationships. They continue to operate with a social license and trust from local leaders, local cooperatives, and the local government.

Q: I imagine that trust takes time to build, and this is part of why it’s so important to have local leaders. Their wisdom must be really important in ensuring the path forward, right?

Casey Harrison: Yes, and it’s why our model is focused on a five to seven year timeframe. You can’t rush all of this. You can move people along more quickly using best-in-class technology, methodologies, and information exchange but it is still rural life. It still depends on the seasons, sometimes only one rainy season. You can operate at an efficient pace, but you can’t rush the behavior change and the value creation. Patient capital investment into these communities over time is vital. You might want to deliver all the impact on a single one to two year project cycle because it’s easier to manage from a donor perspective, but the timeline must be community-based, not project-based. Ultimately, Nuru ensures there’s transparency,  accountability, and there’s trust in how all donor funds are used, but that doesn’t mean that we can rush the actual change on the ground. Our goal is to blend investment that supports cooperatives to strengthen their own long-term sustainability. 

Climate-Smart Cooperatives Navigate Climate Challenges

Q: We’ve touched a bit on the climate aspect–these places are facing the worst of the impacts of climate change. We’re seeing droughts and floods. The situation is often dire. Nuru focuses on being climate-smart. What does that mean?

Casey Harrison: There’s a lot to say here. I’ll start with the outcome that our interventions aim to achieve, which is on-farm resilience for farmers.

Q: What does that mean?

Casey Harrison: It means measurable improvements in soil health and yields, which means decreased dependency on increasingly expensive fertilizers that are being sold to farmers and increased incomes. We transition farmers from inorganic agriculture to something that is more targeted and precise to their local needs. We’re talking about fewer inorganic inputs to get higher yields. On-farm resilience also looks at using organic inputs in combination with other bio fertilizer technologies like inoculants for drought-tolerant legume varieties.

hands holding rich soil in Ethiopia

Soil, Ethiopia, 2014

We also teach farmers to rotate legumes with cereal crops for nitrogen fixation and to improve biomass production, which is the leaf litter. We want to make sure more of that is available either for animals or for the soil. You then ensure there are more nutrients in the soil because either the animals are grazing and fertilizing naturally or there’s more biomass–the leaf litter that’s dried and left behind after harvest. You have to incorporate that back into the soil for greater nitrogen fixation from legume production. That’s just one example. 

We integrate that type of climate-smart agriculture practice that regenerates soil into our training and our extension work. In addition, technology partners, like ignitia, provide weather services for our farmers. We ensure that we take a regenerative view of agricultural systems while looking for pragmatic agricultural practices that are relevant to those communities. Then, we embed that in our training and services. 

Q: And how does this climate-smart aspect fit into the cooperatives?

Casey Harrison: Eventually, that service is handed over to the cooperative who takes on those efforts. So climate-smart regeneration is really at the core of how a cooperative has to do business long-term to be sustainable. It’s also at the core of where climate adaptation meets these communities at a local level. There’s a lot of research right now that points to the importance and the underfunded nature of climate adaptation activities, like the sustainable agriculture support which Nuru delivers in rural areas. Sustainable agriculture is really one of the most cost-efficient investments you can make in climate adaptation. Making that investment in a cooperative agribusiness is an investment that will generate new value: soil health, higher yields, nutrition, etcetera. 

man kneeling down behind thriving crops in Baringo County Kenya

Wilson, Baringo County, Kenya farmer, 2024

I follow the World Resource Institute closely, and I’ve had many friends and colleagues who worked there over the years. I really trust their research, and they’ve done some recent social return on investment analysis that says for every $1 of adaptation that is spent on climate adaptation, which includes sustainable agriculture, it can yield more than $10.50 in benefits over 10 years. That’s a 950% return. 

Measuring What Matters: Professional and Profitable Cooperatives 

Q: That’s incredible. It sounds like the goal is for these cooperatives to successfully deliver services to their members, and then Nuru needs to be far less involved over time. Are there measurements for how Nuru thinks about a successful cooperative? 

Casey Harrison: We work in these yellow zones where farmer groups are in a very early stage of formation or are struggling to operate. In some cases, these groups precede cooperatives, as they aren’t yet formalized, and in others, they are already formalized but their demands for support are not being met. They have, if nothing else, the willingness and motivation to work together. And we measure that up front when we go into a community. We assess that using surveys and other methods provided by partners who we continue to work with over five to seven years, like SCOPEinsight, which is a Netherlands-based assessment tool that looks at professionalism in agribusinesses. We’re saying, “This is a place that has need, has motivation, and it’s benchmarked against international standards in terms of where we’re starting. Let’s invest in change.”

Nuru Ghana farmer training

Cooperative training, Nuru Ghana, 2025

Q: How do these surveys and this benchmarking determine the way forward for Nuru’s business development services?

Casey Harrison: We align our training and local NGO infrastructure to support these businesses around a new international standard: ISO 18716. To most people, an ISO standard doesn’t mean much. Essentially, this standard provides a clear framework and guidance for what defines professionalism in agri-SMEs and cooperative agribusinesses. We align all of our training to achieve and exceed that minimum standard over five to seven years, and we very often exceed it based on SCOPEinsight assessment scores. 

We also structure our work and advance our learning around this ISO by being part of the Agribusiness and Market Ecosystem Alliance (AMEA) network of likeminded organizations around the world that develop curricula and assessment tools. Other members include SCOPEinsight, the International Finance Corporation, IDH, ICRA, and others.

At Nuru, we focus our energy and our resources on curriculum design tailored to local communities. We take those best-in-class tools and adapt them locally to help define a pathway towards professionalism for those nascent startup cooperative businesses. It’s not an external definition of professionalism that we’re implementing. It’s something that we co-create with the cooperatives, so that the community has clear ownership and understanding of growth in order to generate the returns that they need–the revenues and the turnover to cover their costs. This requires Nuru to share all data back to communities. 

women cooperative members in a field of thriving crops in Burkina Faso

Nuru Burkina Faso farmers, 2024

Q: Are there any other standards that Nuru has to take into consideration?

Casey Harrison: You have to understand the basic financial systems that a bank would be looking for in order to meet their due diligence. We align the cooperative vision as a business, their passion as entrepreneurs, and their acumen as agriculturalists with expectations from a financial sector, value chain businesses and the broader agribusiness sector. Then, those cooperatives are able to meet the standards of those other actors in the value chain. For example, if I’m a buyer of soybeans, I have quality, quantity, and timing requirements in order to procure a certain volume of soybean raw material to then be processed in animal feed for the buyer downstream or to be processed into tofu for the consumer and retail market. That buyer, in this example, needs to know how much they can source, when it can be delivered, and what quality standards it will meet before a purchase can be made. We need cooperatives that can work together to deliver that, and that’s what Nuru enables them to do.

group of farmers standing in a line, smiling while holding tree seedlings

Nuru Ethiopia Cooperative leaders with tree seedlings they intend to plant, 2025

Cooperative Sustainability Beyond Nuru 

Q: So, is the plan for these cooperatives to continue once Nuru has drawn down services in that community?

Casey Harrison: Yes. We focus on strengthening and connecting those cooperatives over that five to seven years. The local Nuru NGO will continue to scale to new places where there is need and demand, while the cooperative continues connecting to new markets and opportunities. Civil society in a well-functioning democracy still plays a role. Those relationships between the NGO and the cooperative continue, but significant investments of time and money are drawn down. There’s still a role that can be played to help connect the cooperative to new opportunities, especially in spaces like nature-based solutions, where people are looking for strong, well-functioning local institutions to support durable change across landscapes. But, after five to seven years of strengthening, the cooperatives Nuru serves are ready to connect to those markets because they have the ISO-aligned systems and experiences to deliver and be accountable. That’s where sustainability comes in. They have that ability to continue as a cooperative agribusiness and unlock new lines of revenue, new investment. 

Q: What else helps make that sustainability possible?

Casey Harrison: The system itself reinforces sustainability because where you have strong leadership, trust, and good governance in those institutions locally, they can continue on for as long as there is grassroots community demand. When you look at studies that have been done using a cooperative lifecycle framework, it is leadership and good governance that’s key to longevity and sustainability. Revenues are vital because you have to have that lifeblood of the business. But strong leadership, strong systems, and good governance are just as important to sustainability. And we’ve seen that now in Ethiopia. We’ve seen that now in Kenya. We’re on the verge in Nigeria. And we plan to build on this learning across the West African Sahel. 

Get Involved: Support Cooperatives Today 

Q: If somebody wants to get involved, what are their options for supporting this?

Casey Harrison: First and foremost, I encourage you to support Nuru Burkina Faso, Nuru Ethiopia, Nuru Ghana, Nuru Kenya, Nuru Niger, and Nuru Nigeria. It’s really important to tell their stories and learn more about the work through things like our impact reports generated in partnership with the Ray Marshall Center. Take the time to learn about the Nuru Collective and my inspiring colleagues. We really could use more people understanding the good work that’s being done locally by Nuru NGOs and other important local leaders. For me, it starts with learning about people and the place, and then challenging our assumptions.

If you’re trying to support cooperatives, get behind International Day of the Cooperative. Learn more about cooperatives and the value that they add to the economy and inclusive green growth. Self-education and awareness raising are important, whether it’s for Nuru or cooperatives as a whole. 

group of women standing behind farming equipment

Nuru Nigeria cooperative members at training event, 2024

Go buy a share in your local cooperative. That’s something else you could do. Be an actual shareholding member–see how the governance works for yourself. See if it meets your values. See if it’s something you’d want to invest in more. If you see that value around cooperatives, then we would welcome your support at Nuru to continue to do our work in fragile, rural communities. We can come together for resilient market systems’ development to effectively build commerce around these rural communities long-term.

 

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