Elsevier

World Development

Volume 36, Issue 11, November 2008, Pages 2188-2204
World Development

Do Village Organizations Make a Difference in African Rural Development? A Study for Senegal and Burkina Faso

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2007.10.010Get rights and content

Summary

Quantitative and qualitative analyses are used to assess the existence of village organizations (VOs), their performance, and members’ participation in benefits in Senegal and Burkina Faso. VOs are classified into market-oriented (MOs) and community-oriented (COs). Results show that organizations are present in a majority of villages and include a high share of rural households. Diffusion of MOs is limited by isolation and social conservatism. Performance is constrained by low professional management capacity and lack of access to resources. With elaborate administrative rules in place, participation in benefits shows no occurrence of leader or elite capture in MOs.

Introduction

Village organizations (VOs) are composed of members seeking to improve their livelihoods through collective action. They differ from traditional organizations in that their functions include mediating the relations between villagers and economic, institutional, and political actors outside the farming community, while traditional organizations mainly regulate relations within the community (Mercoiret & Berthomé, 1997). They also differ from traditional organizations by having legal status and formal membership. They fulfill three main functions for their members: provide services when markets fail, club goods or local public goods when states fail, and voice in political affairs (Collion and Rondot, 1998, Diagne and Pesche, 1995). These organizations take different forms in different parts of the world, ranging from producer cooperatives to broad multipurpose organizations.

Producer organizations have played a major role in the successful performance of the family farm in industrialized countries (Malassis, 2000), and this role continues unabated today. In the European Union, for instance, there are some 30,000 agricultural cooperatives with 9 million members, accounting for 50% of the overall market for inputs and 60% of the market for products (Mercoiret, Pesche, & Bosc, 2006). In the United States, cooperatives control about 80% of dairy production and most specialty producers in California are organized in cooperatives.

Producer organizations are spreading rapidly in developing countries as well (Berdegué, 2001, Uphoff, 1993). The Indian Dairy Cooperatives have 12.3 million members, mainly smallholders and landless households, accounting for 22% of the milk produced in India. The National Federation of Coffee Growers in Colombia has 310,000 members and provides production and marketing services to half a million coffee growers, most of them with less than 2 hectares. Besides services to its members, the Federation also delivers public goods (research, extension, health, education) and infrastructure (rural roads, electrification) for coffee-growing communities. International organizations such as the International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP) with 115 national federations in 80 countries, and Via Campesina with 92 federations or unions, have become major advocates of family farmer interests in international negotiations. In as much as the family farm has proven to be historically one of the most effective ways of organizing agricultural production, competitiveness of the family farm, in particular in the emerging context of concentrated value chains for inputs, agro-processing, and marketing, requires effective organizations for service, market power, and political voice. In coffee production, for instance, 25 million producers, mainly smallholders, face four international traders that control 40% of the market and four coffee roasters that control 45% of the activity. Membership to a producer organization is a necessary condition to gain access to these markets and have some bargaining power. Village organizations are increasingly considered as essential partners by development agencies which frequently rely on them to implement their programs. This is particularly the case for the new wave of community-driven development (CDD) programs based on decentralization and participation (Mansuri and Rao, 2004, World Bank, 2002).1 Contributions of VOs to development have been recognized in numerous studies on the role of social capital in growth, poverty reduction, and resource management (Uphoff and Wijayaratna, 2000, Durlauf and Fafchamps, 2004).

VOs are increasingly important in West Africa where agricultural growth is decidedly smallholder based. Organizations emerged in the 1960s as government promoted cooperatives to enforce production quotas for cash crops and to distribute subsidized credit and inputs (Collion & Rondot, 1998). With economic and political liberalization in the 1980s, producers started to developed more autonomous organizations as an alternative to the state-controlled cooperatives. These organizations have multiplied rapidly, following contraction of the role of the state in agriculture after the debt crisis and the ensuing structural adjustment programs.2 Today, VOs are present in a large number of West African villages, where they serve as a major interface between the village community, the market, and the state. National federations in Senegal (Conseil National de Concertation et de Coopération des Ruraux) and Mali are interlocutors in policy formation (Mercoiret et al., 2006). It is consequently important to ask how effective are VOs in African rural development, and what can be done to enhance their performance.

Numerous case studies have contributed important understanding to the existence, performance, and benefits for members of village organizations (Tendler, 1983, Thorp). However, with a few exceptions such as Donnelly-Roark, Ouedraogo, and Ye (2001) and Grootaert, Oh, and Swamy (2002) for Burkina Faso, there is limited quantitative evidence on VOs in terms of prevalence, performance, and participation in benefits. This paper uses extensive case studies of VOs complemented by two large surveys of organizations in Senegal and Burkina Faso to provide a diagnostic on organizations.

Both countries have undergone important economic reforms since the mid 1980s. However, despite increased growth rates (from around 2% before 1995 to an average of 5% a year since then), rural poverty rates have remained at 53% in Burkina Faso and 65% in Senegal with little decline (Boccanfuso & Kaboré, 2004). The paradox is that this lack of material gains has occurred in a context of remarkable institutional progress. Our data indicate that VOs are present in a majority of villages, and that a majority of rural households participate in these organizations. Thus, even if the diffusion of organizations is still incomplete, they are extensively present in rural areas. In both countries, we find that the poorest community members tend to participate in VOs as much as their richer neighbors, and uncover little evidence of elite capture and corruption, likely as a consequence of the elaborate rules that characterize the management of these organizations in West Africa. However, we find that despite elaborate rules and procedures, and although effective in providing training and information services, these organizations are generally limited in delivering material benefits to their members. Unlike other studies (e.g., Uphoff, 1993), our results thus suggest that the overall poor performance of VOs is not due to capture by local elites, but rather to low managerial capacity and to “penny capitalism” due to severe lack of access to resources.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the data and proposes a classification of organizations between “Market-oriented” and “Community-oriented.” Section 3 describes the existence of VOs in both countries since the mid-1980s and analyzes the constraints on further diffusion. In Section 4, we analyze the performance of MOs and COs in servicing their members. We show that performance is constrained by limited managerial capacity and by lack of access to resources. In Section 5, we analyze the issue of participation in benefits and find no evidence of systematic capture by organization leaders, and only limited capture by elite members in COs which is reduced by improved internal controls. Section 6 concludes with recommendations as to how to enhance the role of organizations in support of smallholder agricultural development.

Section snippets

The field work

Toward the end of the 1990s, governments and donors recognized the potential role of VOs as major development actors in rural Africa. In Senegal and Burkina Faso, this led to the implementation of two country-wide programs aimed at reinforcing the capacities of VOs in providing services to their members.

Rapid diffusion of organizations

Retrospective data collected in the surveys help retrace the evolution of VOs since the beginning of the 1980s and their prevalence at the time of the survey. In both countries, the presence of VOs has increased rapidly. In Senegal, 10% of the villages had at least one VO in 1982; by 2002, this figure had risen to 65%. Data for Burkina Faso also show rapid growth, with 22% of the villages that had at least one organization in 1982 and 91% in 2002.

Rapid expansion applies to both MOs and COs. 47%

Performance

The previous section showed that VOs offer a major channel to reach smallholders. However, their capacity to “make a difference” in rural development will also depend on their effectiveness at servicing their members. In this section, we show that these organizations are in fact relatively weak at delivering benefits to their members. Two hypotheses are tested to explain this apparent poor performance: they have weak managerial capacity; and they lack sufficient resources to make a difference.

Participation in benefits

Is poor performance—that is, limited access to benefits for members—due to elite capture and corruption? Even though capture of benefits by elites and leaders has been extensively decried in the literature on VOs, this does not seem to be the case in West Africa, in part due to extensive openness of access to membership and strong internal checks on the distribution of benefits. Indeed, these organizations are quite inclusive of poor households in the villages. As shown in Table 7, although

Conclusions

Starting in the 1990s with the withdrawal of the role of the state and increasing interest of governments and development agencies in village organizations, in particular for their support to the competitiveness of a smallholder sector, VOs have become central partners for governments, non-governmental organizations, and bilateral donors engaged in rural development. Nevertheless, few studies have characterized the effective capacity of VOs at reaching the rural poor and making a difference for

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Jean-Louis Arcand, Maguelonne Chanron, Marius Dia, Mouhamadou Lamine Dial, Gershon Feder, Ousmane Ndiaye, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Drissa Sawadogo, and Adama Touré for their collaboration, to members of organizations and colleagues in Senegal and Burkina Faso who participated in field work and seminars, and to the Norwegian Trust Fund at the World Bank for financial support.

References (24)

  • Durlauf, S. N., & Fafchamps, M. (2004). Social Capital. NBER Working Paper No....
  • M. Fafchamps

    Solidarity networks in pre-industrial societies: Rational peasants with a moral economy

    Economic Development and Cultural Change

    (1992)
  • Cited by (90)

    • Transforming food systems through inclusive agribusiness

      2022, World Development
      Citation Excerpt :

      Schoneveld et al. (2021), for example, demonstrate that within CF schemes for perennial crops, older and land-poor smallholders are less likely to benefit from participation. Bernard et al. (2008) and Verhofstadt and Maertens (2014) also find that land-poor farmers derive fewer gains from cooperative participation than more land endowed farmers. Available evidence therefore suggests that mainstream IAB models rarely include and are less likely to benefit more marginalized segments of the rural population.

    • Fragmentation by design: Universal health coverage policies as governmentality in Senegal

      2020, Social Science and Medicine
      Citation Excerpt :

      In this way, the tasks of knowing and governing have been dispersed through a myriad of micro-centres of knowledge and power (Rose, 1999). Since the late 1990s, Senegal has witnessed a rapid increase in the number of CBHI schemes (reaching 129 in 2007 (CAFSP, 2010)) and other types of community-based organisations (Bernard et al., 2008). In the interviews, some older people reported using both CBHI and PS.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text