The Farmer to Farmer (F2F) team met with the members of Jory Cooperative to follow up with them on their recent activities.

The Jory co-op works on medicinal and aromatic plants and natural cosmetics products. On September 28, the co-op members participated in a training on building an integrated forecasting, planning, budgeting, and reporting process. This helped them to understand cost behavior more accurately in order to improve their budgeting skills required for better decision-making and enable the host organization to better plan for future expenditures compared to actual ones. Hence, the budgeting can serve both as a planning and a control tool. The skills they have gained as a result of this training will ensure that their financial plans remain sound and sustainable in the long run.

Furthermore, the members adopted the recommendations from the F2F assignment, which was to develop a budget plan for the year of 2022 and create a chat group to discuss and share ideas about budgeting.

The cooperative’s female members also benefited from an IMAGINE workshop last May, and some of them took a priceless opportunity following that to create a literacy cooperative, which is the first one in Sid Zouin municipality. It will impact a number of real dichotomies affecting women: personal/collective, domestic/public, and material/ideological.

The women of Jory Cooperative know the need for women to benefit from educational opportunities and consider that the “most urgent priority is to ensure access to, and improve the quality of, education for girls and women, and to remove every obstacle that hampers their active participation.”

While several groups include the word empowerment in their discourse, much less often is there evidence of developing and funding activities that identify empowerment as a genuine goal. Jory’s Cooperative is then a great success story as the empowerment training enabled the women to gain relative strength as a result of having choices and bargaining power, and we look forward to seeing what everyone continues to accomplish!