Women's Empowerment in Africa

Members of the Aboghlou Women’s Cooperative in the Ourika Valley, Morocco (photo by the High Atlas Foundation).

This week we celebrate the United Nations International Day of Cooperatives, commemorated every year on the first Saturday of July. Cooperatives’ success in sustainable development, wealth creation, and poverty alleviation give many hope for an equitable future. As we commend cooperatives, it is important to recognize and understand how they function.

Cooperatives are largely based on the Rochdale Society in 1844 from England. In a time of terrible working conditions and low wages, this group of poor, English weavers  struggled to buy basic goods, like flour. Without a rich, capitalist donor, the members all pooled their money to collectively purchase necessities. Their contribution earned them a say in the management of the association, and an equitable distribution of the net profits.

As the first largely successful cooperative, their principles have endured. Further, cooperatives have been a model for communities to come together and lift themselves out of poverty through democratic practices. According to the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) today, they should follow seven rules:

  1.  Voluntary and Open Membership: anyone who can benefit and contribute can join.
  2.  Democratic Member Control: members participate in policy and decision-making.
 3.  Member Economic Participation: members contribute and manage the capital, the common property of the cooperative.
 4.  Autonomy and Independence: members control the cooperative in agreements with other organizations, governments, or external donors.
  5.  Education, Training, and Information: cooperatives give members life and work skills.
  6.  Cooperation among Cooperatives: cooperatives ought to empower each other.
  7.  Concern for Community: members sustainably develop their communities.

Cooperatives have shown promise in developing their local economies. They produce the supplies and reap the rewards, making decisions that holistically benefit everyone. They act as an economic mover in democracy and civic society building, helping communities articulate their needs. They allow people to collectively compete in markets, and individually elevate their roles in the economy and society.

In Morocco, the model most familiar to Westerners would be women’s cooperatives. Rural women have expressed a desire to work, earn money, and make decisions. By exporting fair trade handicrafts and products, they receive income where they were previously marginalized, unskilled, and relegated to household roles. For example, in the Ourika Valley, the Aboghlou Cooperative makes couscous and other dried goods. These 32 women got the capital necessary to grow almond seedlings for families and schools. In 2017, they also harvested and processed 60 kg of calendula flowers, selling to companies like L’Oreal.

International companies are proud to support these cooperatives and affirm their ethical consumerism. This has been a veritable boon for the economy. Additionally, Moroccan cooperatives like the Izourane Ouargane Women’s Cooperative produce and sell argan oil. By running a business and negotiating with Western cosmetic companies, the women earn and share both profit and respect. They learn through experience, growing more confident about how to manage a business.

However, cooperatives are under threat from imposters and uncertainty. Foreigners that come to Morocco want to support women's cooperatives and buy their products, but they are worried about insincere businesses that abuse the label to trick them. Their concern lies in tourist traps where the women only have performative roles, such as publically sorting the argan products, but do not have their fair share of control or profit. They know that untrustworthy middlemen exploit their sympathy for women’s development and empowerment.

There is a broad asymmetry of market information in Morocco, especially for tourists. Sellers always have the advantage in knowing the true value of their goods, and in the souks, products are rarely branded, priced, or otherwise consistently labelled. Locals would have more expertise in discerning good quality materials from scams, but foreigners are more wary. Tourists are always pursuing authenticity in their new experiences, and want proof of legitimacy.

Accordingly, there needs to be an international verification for cooperatives. Just as products need to meet a standard to be certified organic, entreprises that claim to be cooperatives ought to meet a standard to use the label. The ICA launched the Cooperative Marque in 2013, to emphasize the viability of the cooperative structure as professional and contemporary. An expansion of that could decidedly label cooperatives for being ethical and developmental. The Moroccan Office du Développement de la Coopération has a form for cooperatives to register themselves, but this information is not easily or ostentatiously available on products. Cooperatives that claim to help women should be examined and have more legitimacy on a global scale.

Cooperatives have so much potential to sustainably lift people out of poverty. They can move people from subsistence agriculture to international commerce, bring communities together to capitalize on their shared resources, and improve living standards alongside economic opportunities. However, they need help. Cooperatives need assistance with facilitating dialogue and certification from an international standard. Cooperatives are founded upon trust between their members and the global public. While we celebrate them and all of the good they have done this week, let us support them as well.

Give to Cooperatives and these projects.

Photo 1: The Aboghlou Women’s Cooperative at work drying calendula flowers (photo by the High Atlas Foundation).

Photo 2: Members of the Izourane Ouargane Women’s Cooperative in Essaouira process argan (photo by the High Atlas Foundation)

In the village commune of Ourika, Morocco a women’s cooperative successfully cultivates vast fields of calendula flowers. Though in this part of the world patriarchal ideals still often reign supreme, these women own the rights to their land, manage their own bank account, and are the sole executors of the cooperative’s business decisions.

The High Atlas Foundation (HAF) partnered with the PUR project in 2015 to begin the process of women’s empowerment projects in the Al Haouz region of Morocco (where Ourika is located). Operating on the basis of rights-based and participatory development approaches, the HAF team set out to assess the needs of women in these rural communities. What we found was a lack of self-esteem and ability to visualize future goals.

In order to provide these women with the capacity to become social, political, and economic participants in their communities we began conducting training workshops, which integrate Moroccan personal law (Moudawana), intensive self-discovery processes, and agricultural and business training to empower rural women to become more independent. HAF partnered with local universities to train 59 women from five different villages in the Ourika Valley.

Many of the women expressed a desire to work outside their homes, to earn money for themselves and their families, and to finally be able to profit from their own labor. In order to facilitate this, HAF, supported by the PUR Project, assisted a group of 32 Ourika women in establishing their own cooperative, called the Aboghlou Cooperative. On land donated to the cooperative, the women grow almonds, pomegranate, iris, medicinal plants, and calendula, which they sell through the cooperative for profit. Because our workshops focus on discovering and supporting the individual aspirations of these rural women, the results are the product of the women themselves. 

HAF conducts weekly or bi-weekly site visits and meetings with the women to discuss the cooperative’s project development. I accompanied Amina El Hajjami, HAF’s project manager, on one of these visits in June of 2018.

I had spent the past week living in Marrakech, Morocco where I had very little interaction with local women aside from those working with HAF. I had quickly become accustomed to covered women moving through the city almost silently, hardly smiling and certainly never laughing, so my visit to the Aboghlou cooperative came as a shock and pleasant surprise. Immediately upon our arrival, women began calling out to Amina as though she were an old friend. There was music playing from a small radio, and one of the women’s son played in the shade nearby. Here the women, all in big straw hats to shelter from the sun, spoke freely and often. Though I could not understand their words – they speak a local dialect called Tashelheit – from the tone and frequent laughter it was clear they spoke as friends, joking and even singing. I thought that this was the difference empowerment and financial independence could make in the lives of women.

Our visit was focused primarily on the women’s calendula and medicinal plants gardens. In 2017, the women harvested and sold 60kg of dried calendula, this year they hope to produce 200kg. Each year since the beginning of the cooperative in 2015 the women have managed to grow and scale their production, becoming more and more confident in their abilities and, subsequently, more successful.

One of the cornerstones of our visits is group meetings with the entire cooperative, where the women can raise concerns and discuss their plans for the future. Currently, the women have begun growing geranium, lemon verbena, and althea in small quantities. These they will send to PUR Project for testing before they begin large scale production. Throughout the meeting it was clear that these women have just begun to un-tap their potential, both as leaders and as entrepreneurs.

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