Rwanda cooperatives and their role in Vision 2050.
National Strategy Transformation (NST) 2017-2024 positions technology as a cornerstone for socio-economic development, and this evidences the need for the digitalization of cooperatives as a step towards Vision 2025.
According to the Rwanda Cooperative Agency Report 2022- 2023, the country has 10,563 cooperatives, representing over 5.1 million members. These cooperatives span various sectors, with agriculture leading at 46.8%, services at 16.9%, trading at 14.8%, and handicrafts at 10.0%. Financial cooperatives, umbrella organizations, and other sectors account for the remaining 11.4%. Statistics show that these cooperatives have pooled an impressive RWF of 28,792 billion as the total share capital of their members, highlighting their significant contribution to Rwanda’s economy. Despite their achievements, most cooperatives continue to use traditional methods, including paper-based data management, membership management, and financial reporting in their daily activities. This hinders their data security and informed decision-making and reduces trust within their key partners. This also reduces the transparency among the cooperative members since it is easy to embezzle property and money in the cooperative.
According to the Rwanda Cooperative Agency Fiscal Year Report 2023-2024, 1,764 cooperatives positively impacted economic development in general. However, during this inspection, several challenges were highlighted where: 55 cooperatives faced a challenge in human resource management, 630 cooperatives had financial management issues, 985 cooperatives had bookkeeping issues, 55 faced embezzlement, 41 faced conflicts, 78 cooperatives lacked market access, 77 cooperatives face limited ownership issues. RCA Fiscal Year Report
These findings are evidence of the need to digitalize cooperatives to improve their efficiency.
Rwanda Economy Digitalisation Program Phase
The second phase of the Rwanda Economy Digitization Programme is a three-year initiative by the Government of Rwanda (MINICT) and Cenfri, funded by the Mastercard Foundation. Rwanda ICT Chamber is implementing the private sector section of the program. This phase started in August 2024 with the aim of digitizing medium and large businesses across Rwanda in the Private Sector. Regarding cooperatives, REDP 2 aims to increase efficiency and reduce poverty through digitalization and data management. Significant efforts are being made to enhance the digital capabilities of cooperatives through organizing workshops and raising awareness to embark on their digital transformation journey to integrate digital tools and improve cooperative operations in member management, online buying and selling products or services, e-payment, data management, and analysis, significantly enhancing efficiency and profitability. These innovations streamline administrative tasks, provide real-time market insights, and improve resource allocation, enabling cooperatives to deliver better services to their members. This program mainly supports cooperatives with operations outside Kigali and works with specific sectors critical to the country’s economic development, namely tourism, trade, education, agriculture, and cross-cutting sectors like finance and ICT More information on the selection criteria of cooperatives.
Rubavu Awareness Session
On 27th November in Rubavu, Rwanda ICT Chamber organized a hands-on, interactive workshop introducing cooperatives with practical knowledge and tools to embark on their digital transformation and data management journey. This initiative is part of the ongoing Cooperative Awareness in the Digital Transformation Journey across the country, focusing on enhancing cooperative management through modern digital solutions. The awareness session informs cooperatives about digitization, what can be digitized, and the advantages of digitizing their cooperatives. They were also taught about data management and especially about data privacy and protection. During this visit, 21 cooperatives with 87 members, were trained to use digital tools for their cooperative growth and efficient operation. Recap on Rubavu awareness session. These cooperatives were also introduced to COPA Platform, where they were given insights on how to be onboarded on COPA and what are the different features that are beneficial to cooperatives like Ejo Heza, recording and tracking their sales and management of the members.
Cooperative members being taught the benefits of digitalization to their cooperatives
Current State of Cooperatives
These cooperatives have limited access to digital skills, digital tools, digital infrastructure, and digital financial services. Most ICT tools are quite costly, which discourages cooperatives from purchasing and using them. The cooperatives also face a challenge in accessing loans from banks, especially those in the agricultural sector. And with a big number of cooperative members being more than 35 years (out of the youth range), there is slow adoption of ICT with very low skills among those who have the awareness.
Read more about the Rwanda Economy Digitalisation Programme and learn how your businesses can transform to digitalization by 2025. To be considered in the RDEP programme, please fill out this form
