West Africa Cooperatives

completed

The overall objective of the advisory project is to strengthen the performance of cooperatives (coops) in the client's cocoa supply chain by supporting them to develop advanced business management skills and to benchmark their management capability and professionalism for consideration for medium-term financing by commercial lenders. Although this project is focused on IFC's client, the experiences and tools developed as a result of the project will serve to inform future interventions in the cocoa sector involving coops. First, the training tools as well as the knowledge developed as a result of the project will be shared with the Conseil du Cafe-Cacao, the government body in charge of the cocoa sector that is planning to scale up its support to coops. The government as well as other companies in the private sector will have access to improved training content, and experienced trainers developed as a result of the IFC project which they can use to serve an even wider population of coops in West Africa. Second, the coop benchmarking tool for which IFC has intellectual property (IP) rights and is co-developing with ScopeInsight, will be used in other IFC projects. The impact evaluation planned for this project will provide valuable lessons for other cocoa actors working with coops. The project seeks to achieve the following objectives by the end of project implementation: 1. Improve the governance and management capabilities of coops by: (a) Establishing a national training program for coop leaders focused on building advanced business management skills. (b) Establishing a core set of certified Business Edge trainers. (c) Delivering classroom-based intensive customised training and coaching to coops. 2. Benchmark coop management capability and professionalism and provide customised support geared towards market demands by: (a) Piloting a new coop benchmarking tool to assess coop capacity pre- and post-training/coaching to provide FIs insight into the professionalism and creditworthiness of coops. The benchmarking tool will also serve to identify what kind of capacity building is required to inform an intensive training and coaching, and to measure the effectiveness of the training/coaching itself. (b) Providing coops access to leasing knowledge including information to finance their equipment needs to prepare them to enter a potential engagement with a FI. (c) Providing direct assistance to high-performing coops in preparing required business and financial documents to present to FIs. External validation of this project will be coops successful in accessing finance from the IFC risk-sharing facility. The benchmarking tool will not only measure effectiveness of training/coaching, but also provide an objective and rigourous assessment of coop capability in key dimensions.