A PROFILE OF WOMEN’S COOPERATIVES IN AGUATA, 1961-1999

Abstract

The idea of women’s cooperatives originated in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century with the formation of the Co-operative Women’s Guild in 1883. The mixed-gender cooperatives had all failed to provide women with a platform to participate and gain experience in their country’s political economy. Women could not play a significant role in those cooperatives simply because they were, to all intents and purposes, excluded from the leadership of those cooperatives. Having identified this gender-based discrimination in their colony of Nigeria, the colonial administrators encouraged the formation of all-women’s cooperatives. The idea was to foster women’s cooperatives that would specifically address issues affecting women. Aguata was among the first places, in the 1960s, to witness the formation of women’s cooperatives in the now defunct Eastern Nigeria region. By the 1980s, a number of women’s cooperatives had sprung up in the area. Courtesy of the Better Life for Rural Women Programme, the Babangida era (1985-1993) was the heyday of women’s cooperatives in Nigeria. Many development scholars and researchers in women’s studies will not hesitate to pay homage to that programme for making the issue of women’s empowerment a priority item on the country’s development agenda. Better Life (BL) had particularly increased the level of co-operative awareness among women in the Aguata Local Government Area of Anambra State. As our findings indicate, all but one of the five women’s cooperatives established between 1961-1988 have become extinct. Yet, as interesting as this historical phenomenon is, no historical study has been carried out on the cooperatives. It was the need to remedy the neglect that instigated this historical study of the five government-registered/recognized women’s cooperatives we had in that local government area as of 30th September 1988. The study investigated those cooperatives with a view to ascertaining their successes as well as the challenges they encountered. Its conclusion is that apart from fostering the development of their respective host communities, they undoubtedly improved the quality of life of its members. Narrative-cum-descriptive method of historical presentation was used to analyze the data that came from primary and secondary sources. As for the period of study, 1961 was the year the first women cooperative was founded while women’s cooperatives in Nigeria have been largely neglected by policymakers at all the three levels of government since 1999 when civilian rule was restored in Nigeria.