Sacco Societies Regulatory Authority (SASRA) Chairman Jack Ranguma was taken aback that Saccos in Homa County, Kisumu, Siaya and Migori counties have a combined total asset of about KSh3.6 billion.
Speaking during Keystone Sacco’s Annual General Meeting, Ranguma was short of terming it as underperformance.
According to SASRA, by the close of 2022, Saccos had a combined asset of KSh886 billion.
Saccos from the above counties had a combined asset base of about Ksh3.6 billion, representing a paltry 0.4 per cent.
And it should have been worrying to Ranguma that a number of Saccos and co-operatives gave the 2023 Ushirika Day celebrations a wide berth.
Out of the 823 co-operatives invited to participate by the adjudication team, 107 responded.
A look at the participating list did not feature any Sacco or co-operative society from the former Nyanza region, which comprises Kisii, Nyamira, Homa Bay, Kisumu, Migori, and Siaya counties.
The event is highly esteemed as it gives co-operatives a platform to showcase their place in empowering members’ living standards and accelerating the country’s economic growth.
Besides, they epitomize shared prosperity and resilience as advanced by the co-operative movement.
Saccos have been at the forefront in mobilising savings and extending affordable credit to members compared to banks.
Some of the Saccos from the region include Keystone, Sonyaco, Migori Teachers, Stake Kenya, Fortitude, Jumuisha, Rachuonyo, Koru and Taraji.
The rain started beating the Sacco subsector in the region due to what many attribute to greed for leadership.
“With the creation of new districts, there was demand for the creation of a Sacco,” one official said in a past interview.
Even a call by former co-operative minister the late Joe Nyaga to merge the entities was not heeded.
Perturbed by the high number of Saccos and a few memberships, Nyaga cautioned that one is better off as a board member of a big Sacco with over 10,000 members than being a board chair of 1,000 members.
However, there is hope in the region to take a leading role in deepening financial inclusion efforts.
From rice fields to sugarcane plantations and the eddying of the gigantic Lake Victoria, whose fish delicacy feeds many Kenyans, the region presents an enormous potential for the Sacco subsector to thrive.
With the rising rice consumption, the Ahero rice fields can form a sustainable source of income for the co-operative movement in the region.
At the back end of all this is to build capital from which the region’s population can build industries.
With a young population, where imparting knowledge on co-operatives can do magic, this is one area that can add a huge chunk of the asset base to propel Kenya’s co-operative movement to greater heights.
And even a number of top Sacco CEOs based in Nairobi are sons and daughters from the lakeside region, besides other Sacco-related bodies.
As a Sacco CEO from the region would say, a few years ago, some members of a Sacco from Central Kenya toured them. “Ordinarily, you visit to learn how they have been able to succeed in their endeavors. But in this case, they visited as a word of caution on how not to fail.”
Poor performance in the co-operative sector indicates the region’s low economic activities, which also translates to low unemployment rates, insufficient incomes and poor living standards.
Whether it is time to tap the enormous potential region or slap some sense into the leaders and people from the region remains the big question.
In the meantime, the ingredients of vibrancy to economic activity, resilience and shared prosperity the co-operative movement injects into the economy would be missed.
