The Emergence of Multipurpose Women’s Co-operatives
LACK OF SOCIAL SECURITY (ACTIVE) (N=63)
3.7 The challenges faced by women’s co-operatives: Why do they close? 35 Women’s co-operatives in Turkey face distinct external and internal challenges
3.7.2 Internal challenges
Internal challenges are challenges that arise within the women’s co-operative. These are challenges that can be controlled or changed by women’s co-operatives and their members. These challenges are experienced by all of respondents in varying degrees, as demonstrated in the following response to an interview:
“The problems we had are not specific to us but to most of the co-operatives. We know that most of the co-operatives are facing such problems. ”
3.7.2.1. Lack of understanding about women’s co-operatives and associative skills
While there is a lack of understanding about women’s co-operatives by authorities, the wider community and husbands, many members and beneficiaries also do not fully comprehend the inner workings of women’s co-operatives or their dual social and economic nature.
Some of members, founders, presidents and board chairs also acknowledged the lack of associative skills. “Associative skills” is a general term used to describe the skills and knowledge required to effectively manage and lead a women’s co-operative.
These consist of but are not limited to: encouraging women to participate, co-operative leadership skill building for founders and members of the co-co-operative, trust building, co-operative policy development, developing good governance procedures, membership drives, collective decision-making, co-operative management through elected representation, how to work with or on a board and/or awareness campaigns. This quote from a founder also speaks to the lack of associative skills for running a women’s co-operative:
“We started by not knowing too much about how to start and run a co-operative or have a co-operative vision. It was good at the beginning, everything went well. However, later members became self-centred, started to think the co-operative as a business rather than a social co-operative. That was the main problem. ’
Balancing the social and economic aspects of women’s co-operatives may also bedifficult. Here a member highlights this:
“Some members insisted that the co-operative was in a way an NGO; other groups insisted that the co-operative had to earn money and make profit. Then problems started to arise. ”
3.7.2.2. Lack of business skills
The survey, interviews and micronarratives illustrated that the founders, board and members all lacked, to varying degrees, the skills to run the business of their co-operative. This could be business skills such as management, leadership, financial literacy, operations, supply and marketing, and also specific skills for the production of the goods or services offered by the women’s co-operative such as milk cow husbandry. This is identified by the director of a women’s co-operative:
“It was a little difficult for the women members to understand the main business of founding a co-operative and therefore their responsibilities in the organization, because it was founded mostly by housewives and women without work experience.”
For members, founders and the boards of women’s co-operatives learning is accomplished while doing the task and through experience. Testimony to this is the number and diversity of trainings women have expressed that they took. Training topics included: financial literacy, entrepreneurship, computer and internet usage, child development, and early child education.
3.7.2.3. Lack of operational capacity
Women’s co-operatives have had trouble with producing goods or services.
This is sometimes due to lack of proper equipment, other times because of lack knowledge of proper operating procedures. Here a member is quoted stating one of their main challenges was a:
“Lack of equipment and capital support for the workplace that we wanted to build for production.”
In other cases interviewees spoke about trying to shift to a high level of operational capacity.
Pomegranate is highly produced in our region. We wanted to establish a facility that will run 12 months and produce different pomegranate products such as sour pomegranate syrup. We even had TRT (Turkish Radio and Television) shoot a film about it. Our main purpose was to create a brand and do sales professionally. We had interviews with Agriculture and Credit Co-operatives Union and developed some valuable collaborations. Their support would be fruitful but we could not reach to a good standard in producing the syrup because we did not have the proper workplace.
We brought together the place with tools etc. we brought from home. So in fact it is not very suitable for production. And it is not big enough either. So we cannot produce the orders that we get.
3.7.2.4. Interpersonal issues
Women’s co-operatives are also social constructions. Unhealthy interpersonal issues can be a make or break for any enterprise or organization, but especially so for small, local co-operatives. It is important with the co-operative model to have high levels of trust among the membership especially when women are being asked to put themselves on the line personally and financially. Interpersonal issues that are left unchecked can lead to the ruin of co-operatives due to jealousy, greed, misunderstanding, burn out and frustration, especially in small communities where information can travel quickly and have negative effects for members or the women’s co-operative:
™We, as partners could not unite. Our expectations were high, we were impatient to reach them and when we could not, we got disappointed very quickly. We could not organize well and quickly disintegrated.”