COVID-19 Impact on Agricultural Cooperatives: Round Two Brief

Our member, Land O’Lakes Venture37, in collaboration with USAID Office of Local Sustainability has collected data to understand impact of the pandemic on cooperatives in 8 countries.

The USAID Cooperative Development Program, funded out of the USAID Office of Local Sustainability, focuses on building capacity of cooperative businesses for self-reliance, local ownership and sustainability. Land O’Lakes Venture37 has implemented CDP for over 20 years, partnering with cooperatives in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Malawi and Rwanda to improve cooperative performance in response to evolving market conditions.

COVID-19 continues to drastically shift market conditions around the world. These impacts are widely reported across value chains and countries. A collaboration of CDP implementors, and OCDC member organizations led by Venture37 and including Global Communities, Equal Exchange and NCBA-CLUSA are collecting data over three intervals to understand the impacts of COVID-19 on agricultural cooperatives in eight CDP countries. Below are three briefs and a comprehensive analysis in the final report.