Gian Nicola Francesconi

Land Shareholding Cooperatives (LSCs) centralize management over fragmented farmland by converting farmers' plots into shares. While these cooperatives have been widely successful in boosting agricultural commercialization among rural smallholders in China, their potential has not yet been recognized in the African context. To fill this gap, we present and discuss a theoretical framework based on recent literature, an in‐depth case study from Uganda and quantitative analyses of data on horticultural cooperatives from Senegal and agricultural and livestock cooperatives from Uganda, Malawi, Madagascar, Rwanda and Kenya. We uncover the existence of cooperatives built on land sharing schemes in different parts of Africa and especially in Rwanda. We find that these LSCs are more likely to mobilize collective marketing and have a higher business‐membership ratio than traditional cooperatives, and we derive a few implications for policymaking.

While the health impact of COVID-19 in most African countries appears modest, the impact of social distancing measures, closing of markets and reduced mobility is felt across the board. Domestic, labor-intensive and traditional food value chains and the smallholders they serve appear to be particularly affected. During a systemic shock where idiosyncratic risk coping strategies fail, collective or organizational resilience becomes of the essence to protect the livelihoods of smallholders. In this study, we have used pre- and during-shock data on agricultural cooperatives from Southeast Africa to understand how resilient these smallholder-owned organizations are. We find that many organizations could not countervail market-disruptions and fell into a state of dormancy during the pandemic. One reason for this is that collective decision-making was heavily affected by the banning of gatherings. Only a few organizations devised innovative solutions to maintain the market linkages of rural smallholders. The lack of resilience demonstrated by most cooperatives appears to be associated with organizational immaturity, large membership size, elite capture and limited business-orientation, which underscore a general lack of managerial capital.