Impacts: Changing the World over the Long Term
Despite being known by its original name, the Cooperative League of the USA, NCBA’s CLUSA International Program continues to create cooperative-based solutions that reverberate worldwide over. Early in our history, NCBA/CLUSA focused primarily on creating and strengthening cooperative businesses overseas; in recent decades, we have broadened our focus to work with groups and group-enterprises in many sectors. The unifying work is our belief that people can work together – in other words cooperate – to identify and solve their own problems.
NCBA/CLUSA’s involvement in international affairs began in 1945 in an effort to help rebuild war torn Europe. We began by jointly founding the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe – presently known as CARE – in an effort to help rebuild Europe following World War II. NCBA/CLUSA helped fund the venture and our president, Murray Lincoln, became the first president of CARE. CARE has since become one of the world’s premiere emergency assistance programs.
In the 1950’s, NCBA/CLUSA helped to organize and strengthen the AMUL Indian Dairy Cooperatives and IFFCO Fertilizer Cooperatives in India. These two cooperatives have become two of the world’s largest agricultural companies servicing hundreds of millions of people since its creation and producing billions of dollars in revenue each year.
More recently, one of our most successful projects is in East Timor. NCBA/CLUSA’s Café Coopertiva Timor has become the largest supplier of single source coffee to Starbucks and the primary health services provider of the island nation. This project exemplifies the success of our approach by creating a democratically owned and operated cooperative to promote the needs and organize a group of individuals with a common goal or need in order to accumulate wealth and better its members’ livelihoods.
In the sixty-five years since the beginning of our involvement overseas, NCBA/CLUSA has conducted close to 200 projects in nearly 100 countries world-wide. We have provided programmatic and technical assistance in cooperative development, agriculture and food security, natural resource management, community-based health initiatives, democracy and governance, and recently began educating rural farmers through our newest program, Farmer-to-Farmer.
NCBA/CLUSA’s mission is to build and strengthen cooperatives and other forms of private, group-based enterprises by providing technical assistance and training. Such enterprises are member-owned, democratically-operated and organized by their members to provide themselves with needed goods and services. Such organizations promote and represent the interests of their members and enable them to have a stronger bargaining position than they would have as individuals.
NCBA/CLUSA projects also benefit the population as a whole by providing needed goods and services, as well as injecting an additional element of competition into the market. NCBA/CLUSA has seen that this increases the income of not only the individual members, but the whole of the community, in turn, contributing to the reduction of malnutrition, bettering the lives of those in close proximity.
To accomplish our goals, we have partnered with donor agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Norwegian and Danish Aid Agencies, and more recently, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
