3. Applying the resilience framework to producer co-operatives

Introduction

I have introduced you to the basic idea of co-operatives, why co-operatives are considered resilient organisations particularly but not only in a context of crisis, and what some of the challenges are to resilience in the African context. I have also discussed the concept of resilience and provided you with a framework for analysing and understanding resilience – a framework that has been developed initially with the African co-operative movement in mind but which is applicable to other settings.

In this and the next section, I am going to ask you to do more independent study by applying that framework to some case studies. In the final section, I will suggest how you might use the framework in other contexts.

In this section, I want you to consider the experience of two producer co-operative unions in the country of Malawi. Borda-Rodriguez and Vicari researched these co-operative unions (and those considered in Section 4) in February and March of 2013. They have written two short case studies of these co-operative unions (as well as two savings and credit co-operative unions, which appear in Section 4).