Minister for Employment and Labour Relations, Ignatius Baffour Awuah has urged cooperative credit unions in Ghana to modernise their operations in order to continue to stay relevant.

According to the Minister, the importance of the cooperative credit unions to national development cannot be underestimated, hence the need to adapt its operations to modern trends.

He further indicated that cooperatives have proven to be one of the reliable means of pooling resources together for development hence its importance cannot be underestimated.

The Minister who was speaking at the 101st International Cooperatives Day celebration in Accra said “In the past, especially in our rural communities, anywhere you went, any huge building you saw, belonged to the cooperatives. And even in Accra here, you move to Adabraka, most of the mighty buildings in Adabraka that you see today were put up either by the cooperatives or using the resources of cooperative bodies.”

“If in the past, our forefathers and our forebearers saw the need to have unity even in business, why is it that we can’t do same today? That is why personally I have always urged the registrar of cooperatives to find a way to modernise the way you do business at the department so that it will become easy for associations to be formed and also for them to be able to operate.”

Speaking at the same event, the National Chairman of the Ghana Cooperative Credit Unions Association, Dr. B. B. Bengam also called on government to prioritise cooperative systems in its quest to improve food security, bridge the inequality gap and reduce poverty.

He argued that cooperative unions by nature are built on the principle of helping one another making it the surest way to lift people from poverty.

“We keep saying we want food sustainability yet the attention we pay to the agric sector remains something you and I cannot talk about. We say that we are interested in the deprived, yet the cooperatives tackling the very vulnerable people, we are not included. If poverty reduction and indeed food security is anything to go by, the cooperative model is the only way out. We pray that the government and future governments pay attention to the cooperatives.”

The 101st International Cooperatives Day was organised under the theme “Cooperatives for Sustainable Development”