Human Resources Management for Growing SACCOs

Abstract

There are four important assets critical to the survival of any organisation. They are: the physical capital, labour, management and leadership. Each organisation has investors who contribute to the shares that build the organisation as its owners. In cooperative organisations, the ordinary members are th owners of the business. Wiile in ordinary shareholding companies, the shareholders are not necessarily the clients of such organisation, in co-operatives, the shareholders may also be the clients of the organisation. In cooperative, SACCOs for example, the members are the shareholders as well as the primary clients. One of the critical conditions for growing SACCO's is the volume of business between the SACCO's and their members. When members as investors form SACCOs, they therefore need physical capital, labour or staff, management and leadership. While physical capital represents all fixed and non-fixed assets such as land, buildings, machines, vehicles and cash, the most critical asset is human capital (Mabey: 1998) composed of general staff, management and leadership. In this paper, we are going to discuss about human resource management in relation to staff, management and the elected leadership for growing SACCOs. Savings and Credit Co-operative Societies (SACCOs) are member owned financial institutions where these who form them, agree to contribute equally to the building of the fixed assets as well as deposits which they later access as credit and repay with interest. Because SACCOs create fixed assets and deposits for borrowing, they have historically demonstrated an important framework for sustainable self-reliant development. In SACCOs, the individual members save regularly and access credit for their own development. The presentation on human resource management in growing SACCOs will mostly be conceptual for lack of detailed East African research. We shall therefore, cover the following issues: conceptual framework, the technical conditions for growing SACC0s, the macro-micro contexts of SACCOs in East Africa, the human resource management situation and future challenges of growth