VIP Profile: Samia Ausaf, Sabrina Cao, Eva Poon and Daksha Shakya

VIP Profile: Samia Ausaf, Sabrina Cao, Eva Poon and Daksha Shakya

Rwanda, March 2013

Measuring Trust within Cooperatives in Rwanda: A Pilot Study with George Washington University

Worldwide, the rural poor still face significant constraints to generating income. Livelihoods are predominately based in small-scale, low-productivity agriculture, and farmers often lack the resources, capacity and knowledge to upgrade operations, integrate into value chains, and access more lucrative markets.
In many settings, cooperatives have proven to be effective in overcoming these obstacles through improving access to key inputs and technologies, enabling coordinated value-add activity and increasing scale to gain bargaining power in markets. The cooperative business model, however, relies on two elements that can be slow to develop: trust and cohesion. A challenge, therefore, is to develop more efficient and scalable processes that enable people to adopt cooperative practices by realizing the benefits of collaboration sooner.
In partnership with George Washington University (GWU), International Development Studies, the Capstone Project, Global Communities invited four Master Candidates to Rwanda to conduct a research study focusing on how to measure trust within cooperatives. The team interviewed members of 3 cooperatives with individual membership ranging from 26-276 individuals, and conducted focus groups.
The findings from the pilot study brought to light the tradeoff that may exist between the economic benefits and social benefits of cooperatives. The study indicated that smaller cooperatives experience a higher level of trust between members, and between members and management. While increasing the number of members is important to a cooperative in terms of promoting its economic benefits, a large cooperative size may contribute to members’ receiving less social benefits from cooperatives. Additional study results may lend themselves to findings on the relationship between cooperative trust levels and cooperative success.
Resulting findings are intended to help Global Communities’ EMIRGE (Enabling Market Integration through Rural Group Empowerment) program in designing more focused interventions. “This was an important field experience for us.” said Samia, Sabrina, Eva, and Daksha. “Further research is definitely needed to determine the role of social capital in economic development and we are glad to have contributed our part.”