Charles Handy: Village co-operatives find strength in numbers — of co-ops

When my wife and I went to the West Bank to visit Oxfam's Enterprise Development Programme (EDP), we did not expect to come back with important messages for ourselves.

Maybe that is true of all travel: you often learn more about yourselves than the land you came to see. But in this case the lessons were particularly relevant for anyone contemplating a future where jobs may be in short supply and where new businesses are urgently needed.

We were visiting, photographing and interviewing a number of small village co-operatives that were involved in the EDP. The idea is that one of the best ways to improve the living conditions of people, particularly women, in the developing world is to help them to grow a business.

That, indeed, was what we found. Life can't be easy in the occupied territories of Palestine, but you wouldn't know it from meeting these women. When life got tough, the women got going. They didn't look for jobs, or sit moaning about the two governments involved, as some of their husbands like to do; they rallied their neighbours and set up local co-operatives to process and sell the products they used every day: agricultural items such as couscous, thyme, honey and grape molasses.

It is often difficult to get a business going on your own, but with the help of friends it can be much easier. We need, like these women, to rediscover the co-operative approach to business creation. Even if it doesn't at first make a lot of money, it does give one work to do, a community to belong to, a place to go to and a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

Keeping the co-operative small and local, 20 or 30 people, perhaps, keeps it warm and friendly, but small can mean small pickings. This, however, was our next unexpected lesson.

Oxfam, we found, was not interacting directly with these small village businesses but, instead, with the New Farm Company, set up by a retired Palestinian civil servant who had made it his mission to help the farmers to stay on their land and the villagers in their villages. His company would offer to buy products from the co-operatives, test them for quality, package and brand them and market them locally and abroad.In that way they would, together, have a significant market presence and would be able to reach beyond their villages.

Moreover, the New Farm Company is itself a co-operative in which the village co-operatives were part-owners, guaranteeing them a share in its profits and removing any suspicion that they might be taken for a ride by the middle-man.

Oxfam's EDP puts investors' money, a mix of loan and investment, into the New Farm Company, which allows the company, in turn, to buy equipment for the village co-operatives and to provide technical training where needed.

This notion of a co-operative made up of co-operatives has, we discovered, been replicated by the EDP in projects in 11 other developing countries, with a further 20 in the planning stages.

It is an idea that could be usefully employed back home because it allows new businesses to stay small and local but still have a collective size that gives them clout in the marketplace.

Maybe, we reflected on our return, we need our own home-grown version of Oxfam's EDP.

• Charles Handy is a social philosopher and an ambassador for Oxfam's Enterprise Development Programme.

To find out more about the EDP, visit: www.oxfam.org.uk/edp