The agricultural sector is key for Myanmar’s economy, accounting for about one third of its GDP, over one fourth of total export earnings, and half of the total employment. While Myanmar has a great potential to boost economic development through agriculture thanks to its favourable geographical and climatic conditions, the productivity still remains low due to multiple challenges around agricultural policy environment, technology, infrastructure, and institutions.

As part of its efforts to address these issues, the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Irrigation (MoALI) and its Cooperative Department have started to work on strengthening agricultural cooperatives and other farmer organizations, in partnership with the Netherland government and Agriterra, Dutch-based agriculture organization development agency. The initial assessments conducted in 2017 found out that professional and sizable bottom-up organized cooperatives, sound financial management, proper governance and a vision for the future hardly existed. It identified needs for awareness raising on the benefits of cooperation, guidance on internal governance, and external supports to realize their business ambitions in the future.

In order to improve management capacities of farmer cooperatives and organizations, the MoALI, the Cooperative Department and Agriterra agreed to roll out My.Coop, a training programme aimed at enabling agricultural cooperative managers to identify and address major management challenges that are specific to cooperatives in market oriented agricultural development. My.Coop was developed through a partnership of various organizations including Agriterra, the ILO, the ITC-ILO and the FAO, among others.

In November 2017, a first pilot training of the My.Coop was conducted with representatives from local cooperatives, farmer organizations, the Cooperative Department, and the ILO. The My.Coop modules were translated into Burmese and the adaptation process to reflect national and local contexts was started.

In April 2018, a first training of trainers (ToT) workshop was organized to validate the adapted modules 1 and 2, with managers of three cooperatives and 12 staff members of the Cooperative Department. The ToT on modules 3 and 4 is scheduled for August 2018 with the same trainers from the Cooperative Department. In the coming months, these trainers will conduct the full My.Coop training to 25 entrepreneurial farmer cooperatives and organizations that have a reasonable business track record and management potential.

For more information on the My.Coop and its adaptation, see the Guide for Potential Users.