The role of informal microfinance institutions in saving

• Encouraging and supporting, through policies and affirmatives action, the participation
of women in cooperatives (as active members, leaders, professional managers and
employees).
• Researching, gathering and disseminating vital information to cooperatives in particular,
and to farmers generally, on internal and international markets.
• Establishment of a national cooperative bank that, working in unionism with the
expanding savings and credit cooperatives (SACCOs), will provide credit to
cooperatives at favorable rates and also help keep finance mobilizes by cooperatives
within the cooperative movement.
• Strengthen the capacity of the cooperative member through empowerment, education
and training; in this respect the Member Empowerment Programme managed by the
Moshi University College of Cooperative and Business Studies (MUCCOBS) will play a
leading role.
Challenges to the poverty reduction strategies include the HIV/AIDS pandemic and its
devastating impact on young people, and globalization the advent of which the cooperative
movement was ill prepared.
To date the responsibility for the supervision of SACCOs has been placed in the hands of the
Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives. The Banking and Financial Institutions ACT, 1991
provides for the Bank of Tanzania to have overall responsibility for financial sector regulation.
The Bank of Tanzania, therefore, has the authority to ensure that SACCOs are supervised in
accordance with prudential financial norms. In the process of strengthening SACCOs, it is
important that they either become or are linked to professionally manage financial institutions.
Thus, it is envisaged that stronger SACCOs will evolve into community banks, join together to
form cooperative banks or form alliances with other financial institutions.
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