Iringa Hope visits 2013: The SACCOS Training Session Concludes

Today is Saturday. That means that our training program is now over for this spring. In all we counted 75 participants in the program. There were many compliments to the teaching staff. The sessions covered a large amount of information and included group exercises, presentations, and review sessions. The main topics were:

Developing and using your constitution

Bookkeeping

Audits

Preparing and evaluating financial proposals

Managing a SACCOS office

Planning

Legal aspects of a SACCOS

Tom gave a talk about what our goals were for the coming year, things to work on and watch out for, suggestions for making your SACCOS work better, and how we are doing. Sandy gave a greeting and told several sayings that relate to SACCOS in Swahili – Sandy got more applause.

As a last item Malila had the leaders make a schedule with him to come to their villages to work on their registrations. Malila, you may recall, is the Kilolo District Co-op Officer, soon to be promoted. He has been especially helpful. One of our big problems in registering has been the co-op officers who seem to not be aware of the legal requirements! They often want our SACCOS to comply with laws that are way out of date and have been repealed. Malila has promised that he will hold a general meeting of all the co-op officers in the Iringa Region and make sure they are all up to date. He will also make them all aware of the Iringa Hope network and will try to get us an expedited registration system. By the end of the year we expect to be over half of all of the registered SACCOS in this region.

Overall we had 26 villages represented at our meeting. The people came from as far away as Kivalamo (a full day’s trip walking and taking the bus) and Ipolamwa (almost a full day) and as close as Mkimbizi (a short bus trip). They traded ideas, held discussion groups into the night, and generally seemed to enjoy the time they spent.

It has been exciting for us to watch the new SACCOS take their first steps, and we feel pride for those established SACCOS who are growing and prospering. We wish them success as they continue their work to improve the lives of the people in their communities.