Non-Formal Education and Farm Cooperatives in West Africa. Occasional Paper #8.

Although failures have been encountered in the West African cooperative movement, farm cooperatives are an indispensable tool for rural development. They can generate an investment budget at the village level and can provide a stimulating framework for education. The Senegalese farm cooperative movement has experienced a number of problems. Three sets of reasons can explain the failure of the credit (for agricultural inputs) function of the cooperative movement--economic, pedagogical, and sociological. Reasons for the failure of the marketing function are the kind of storage system used in the cooperative markets and the accounting system used. Solutions include reorganization of the cooperative, reform of storage and accounting systems, and nonformal education of members. The more promising Malian experience has resulted in surplus capital that village associations decided to invest collectively in productive investments. The dissemination of a newly developed accounting system in Bambara, the predominant African language of the region, has led villages to restart or set up literacy centers. Some conclusions from these two case studies are that the cooperative must be anchored at the individual village level and that nonformal education is likely to fail if it is not established within the appropriate economic framework.(YLB)