Community development through ommunity organizations!! How far it Works?

Community organizations (Cooperatives) are effective tools for community development because they can, and often do, make community interest a priority over short-term financial gain. Operating as place-based businesses, they do so by choosing to locate their business functions in particular places for social rather than (purely) financial reasons. However, how the cooperatives in the study area are fulfilling their objectives is unknown due to dearths of studies. Therefore, this paper aims at assessing the contribution of cooperatives and the factors determining their contribution towards community development as well as the forward and backward linkages between cooperatives and community in the study area. To address the objectives, both primary and secondary sources of data were used. Primary data was collected from both members and non-members of cooperatives. Out of 12 types of cooperatives established before 2012, one cooperative from each type were selected purposively. From the total 2056 registered members, 324 sample was arrived through Cochran (1977) formula and the members were identified using proportionate random sampling technique. In addition five non-members from the vicinity of each sample cooperative were also included in the sample. The collected data was analyzed using SPSS software (version 21) and descriptive statistics such as frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation and inferential statistics such as Chi-square test and ordered logistic regression were used. The findings indicate that, cooperatives contribute to members in terms of income increment, asset building, direct employment opportunity, accessing marketing information, connecting the members with others as well as engaging them in planting trees. Also cooperatives have created forward linkages with members in terms of provision of training as well as dividend payments and backward linkages through saving, mutual trust and commitment of members. The key informants also revealed that they got basic commodities, fresh fish, fresh milk, and services such as quality school education, furniture, floor mill as well as boat entertainment at their surrounding with reasonable prices/fees. Hence they confirmed that the sampled cooperatives play an essential role in community development. The ordered regression analysis results show that seven predictor variables such as duly election of directors, trained manager, regular audit, adequate working capital, cooperatives relationship with other cooperatives, women participations in governance and adequate government support were found to be highly significant which determine the contribution of cooperatives in community development. However, it found that the inclusion of disadvantage groups, payment of necessary capital, provision of consultancy services, public relation work and participation of women in cooperatives affairs are still inadequate. Iit is recommended that cooperative members, government and NGOs have to work in tandem to address those problems thereby enhancing the capacity of cooperatives for better community development.