“Working together to grow together” – benefits in Mali from creating a cooperative society
Soumaila Keita, champion market gardener in Pelegana, Ségou, Mali, and documents related to the formal registration of their group Kanuba Yuma cooperative.
“My name is Soumaila Keita, a 32-year-old market gardener and head of family who live in Pelegana, in Ségou region. For a long time, we were organized as an association, but faced a number of problems, like poor access to agricultural inputs and few stable outlets for selling our produce. As an informal association, our actions were often isolated, not very effective, and limited the profitability of our production.
But for Soumalia, an encounter with the SafeVeg project was a real turning point. “Real change began with after we went to the first meetings, and the training of internal coaches on cooperative life. The various training served as a trigger for the emergence of our network, and ‘we realized that the solution to our difficulties lay in joining forces and working together”.
“Prior to the project’s intervention, our ‘Kanuba Yuma’ producer network worked as a group, but thanks to the SafeVeg project, we have been able to officially create an agricultural cooperative. Although our cooperative is still in its infancy, our current status is already enabling us to lay solid foundations to increase production to meet market needs, prepare group input purchases, pool our efforts to market our harvest as a group, continue to share experiences, and strengthen our collective skills.”
And even at this early stage, there are already promising results, such as better coordination in planning of farming activities, stronger group dynamics with more solidarity and collective action, and greater visibility in our commune that is attracting the attention of business partners.
“Today” concludes Soumalia, “I’m very proud of the road that we have travelled, all of us in the network, together. By leaving behind the risks in an unstructured group, and to embrace the cooperative dynamic, we have gained in vision, organization and hope. My ambition is to continue along this path to further improve our practices, and above all to encourage other producers to join us, because together, we can build a even stronger, more structured and more resilient market gardening sector.”
This research was carried out with funding from the European Union and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands through the project “Safe locally produced vegetables for West Africa’s consumers (SAFE VEG)” – ID-4000003936, part of the DeSIRA program and implemented by the World Vegetable Center, Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement CIRAD and Wageningen University & Research (WUR), and national partners, the Institut National des Recherches Agricoles du Bénin (INRAB, Benin), Institut de l’Environnement et de Recherches Agricoles (INERA, Burkina Faso), and Institut d’Economie Rurale (IER, Mali).
