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{
"id": 1566486,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1566486/?format=api",
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"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Sen. Oketch Gicheru",
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"speaker": null,
"content": "Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, I rise from the onset to support this Bill that has been moved by the Senate Majority Leader and say that the cooperative movement is one of the best structures of organization in business terms that lifts societies. This Bill seeks to put a legal framework that will ensure there is proper governance for cooperatives in the country. Cooperatives have played a big role in our society by making sure that businesses are started well, are resilient, sustainable and more importantly, can grow to greater heights. However, one thing that has always been elusive to us, as a country, is the governance of cooperatives. For a long time, especially when the cooperative movement started in the agriculture products, the challenge was the governance, which was left at the national level. This was largely because for a long time, we had a unitary Government before devolution. However, even at the advent of devolution, cooperatives have remained governed by the national Government. The core and the sense of cooperatives is to help small and medium enterprises. This was the core of the Kenya Kwanza Manifesto; to look at the micro enterprises, small, medium, and sometimes, the growing businesses in our country with the idea of undoing the challenges that these businesses are facing. It has been proven, time without number, that those challenges are best addressed within cooperatives. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, these businesses exist in the local communities where we come from. They are in the counties, constituencies and in the wards where we come from. However, if you look at the governance structure and the legal infrastructure that defines cooperatives, you will find that it is only at the national level where they have been regulated over time. Therefore, this is the first Bill that seeks to give life to Article 186 of the Constitution, which sometime back when the Constitution was being done, saw a nexus between the national Government and the county governments in the running of some affairs, such as cooperatives, as we are seeing right now. I therefore do not see any good Bill that will be better than this, in terms of giving that legal framework that encompasses counties in order to give them a life in the control of cooperatives. For far too long, cooperatives in this country have faced problems and financing is the biggest one. To the extent that we have seen SACCOs coming in place, being a subset of cooperatives and innovating around the idea of creating credit facilities as well as saving facilities. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, a number of these SACCOs that we have seen in our borders have ended up changing lives. Most of the informal businesses that we see today, or the people who are still in the informal economy, over 70 percent of our country is still in the informal economy. The number of people who are employed and taxed in this country is barely 30 percent. This informal economy sector is the jua kali and boda boda sectors, which the NTSA has said has over 1.5 million people. These people can only make sense of growing their businesses within some form of a SACCO, which has maybe chosen the line of financial services and assists its members to figure out those financial services."
}