MOUAU Don Says Cooperatives Can Lift Nigerians Out of Poverty

Prof. Festus Ugwuoke Agbo of Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike (MOUAU), has urged Nigerians to embrace cooperatives as a practical tool for tackling poverty, saying collective action remains the most effective way to access resources and services that individuals could not afford alone.

Delivering the university’s 71st Inaugural Lecture titled “Cooperating Out of Poverty: If We Co, We Can, Operate Out of Nigeria’s Poverty Conundrum,” on Wednesday, May 13, 2026,  the Professor of Agricultural Economics maintained that as an occupant of the chair in Cooperatives, his three-decade experience as a cooperative administrator and academic had shown him how the model could reduce poverty by improving access to essential services.

Defining a cooperative, Agbo said it is an autonomous association of persons who voluntarily unite to meet common economic, social, and cultural needs through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise. He stressed that cooperatives prioritize people over capital, operate on values of democracy, self-help, equality, and openness, and provide financial inclusion, entrepreneurship support, market access, and agricultural services.

Explaining how cooperatives work, he said members must first identify service gaps, pool resources, and prioritize cooperative education to avoid individualistic tendencies. He noted that unlike other businesses, major decisions in cooperatives are made at general meetings of members, making the structure more democratic and resistant to hijack.

Agbo listed the benefits of cooperatives to include financial inclusion through savings, credit, and insurance; entrepreneurship support through training and funding; better market access and price negotiation; and improved agricultural productivity through inputs and storage facilities.

“There is “no area of our lives that cooperatives cannot improve,” he said, describing the model as a platform for leveraging group synergy to reduce poverty and promote inclusive growth.

The Lecturer described it poverty as a state of resource deprivation where individuals lack food, shelter, healthcare, education, and income. Citing the World Bank, he noted that 50-60% of Nigerians lived below $1.90 a day between 2025 and 2026. He outlined five dimensions of poverty: economic, health, education, social, and environmental, arguing that they interact to worsen hardship across the country.

Quoting the late Prof. Martin O. Ijere, Agbo said a person is poor if their salary cannot take them to the next payday, if they cannot afford quality healthcare, decent housing, or good schools for their children. He added that none of those present at the lecture fell into that category.

Delving into history, Agbo said the concept of “Ogbe-Nyeaka” (literally translated to community support for the weaker members) was a unique cooperative system that was once central to Igbo economic life, regretting that the practice had shifted to “Ogbe Weta”  where even poor traders face levies and extortion, allowing poverty to creep in.

He urged the Igbo not to abandon their cooperative heritage but to revive it in business and agriculture.

Agbo traced the origin of modern cooperatives to the Industrial Revolution in Europe between 1750 and 1850, when mechanization caused unemployment, low wages, and loss of land. He cited the 1844 formation of the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Cooperative Society in England as the first organized response, noting that its success spread cooperative practice across Europe, America, and beyond.

He highlighted Friedrich Raiffeisen’s credit cooperatives in Germany and agricultural cooperatives in Scandinavia as examples of how the model addressed specific gaps for the weak. He quoted former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s description of cooperatives as “the most resilient type of business” that survived the global financial meltdown.

He said agricultural economics graduates could play a key role by forming cooperatives for farmers, creating countervailing power to confront challenges on and off the farm.

The lecture was attended by academics, students, and stakeholders from the cooperative sector.