Our vision
Five things the union intends to build
These are the five points of Requiza Cooperative Union's vision, written out in full. Each one says what the union intends, what it would look like when it is working, and what would have to happen before it does. None of them is described here as finished, because none of them is.
The five points
Read this page as intent, not as a report
A vision is a statement of what an organisation is trying to do. It is not evidence that the work is done, and this page carries no member counts, no cluster totals and no photographs of things that do not yet exist. Where the union has published a number — the share price, the equity split, the savings terms — it is quoted exactly and its condition is quoted with it. Everything else is written in the conditional, on purpose.
- Cooperative clusters Establish clusters in rural and urban settings across Africa. § 01
- Financial and investment inclusion Onboard Africans into the cooperative system and into ownership. § 02
- A new agricultural economy Jobs in food production, processing, packaging and distribution. § 03
- Industrialization Investment into the critical sectors of the economy. § 04
- The business school Train members to hold more than one stream of income. § 05
Point one
Establish cooperative clusters in rural and urban settings across Africa
A cluster is the smallest unit of this union that can actually work: a group of members who meet in one fixed place, every Saturday at 5:00pm, with a chairperson and a financial secretary between them. Small enough that people know one another by name. Formal enough to keep a book.
The union's first point is to put those clusters wherever members are — a village where the nearest bank branch is an hour of transport away, and a street in a city where the branch is close but nobody there owns anything. The two places need the cooperative for different reasons, and the union's answer to both is the same room on the same evening.
Rural and urban is not decoration in that sentence. Money behaves differently in the two places: in one it arrives after a harvest, in the other it arrives on a payday. A cooperative that only understands one of them ends up serving one of them. Clusters are how the same terms reach both without being bent for either.
Every Saturday · 5:00pm
Before a cluster can open
- Members in one place who will meet weekly and save without breaking the run.
- A chairperson to run the meeting and carry questions to the union office.
- A financial secretary willing to keep the record every single week.
- A meeting place that will still be there in twelve months.
- An access code from the union office, so the secretary can enter the week online.
What it looks like when it is working
You can walk to your money
No member has to travel to a head office to save. The meeting is near enough that a bad week costs you an evening, not a day's transport, so the run of Saturdays is not broken by distance.
The same terms in every place
A village cluster and a city cluster subscribe to the same project on the same terms: ₦1,000 a share, minimum 100 shares. No cluster gets a special rate, because a special rate is how a cooperative starts to rot.
The record travels faster than the rumour
The secretary enters the week and the member sees it the same day in their own back office. A cluster that can show its book on a phone does not need anybody to take its word for anything.
What is not claimed here
The union has not published how many clusters exist, or where they meet. Until it does, nothing on this page should be read as a map. If you want to know whether there is a cluster near you, ask the office and expect a straight answer with a place and a time in it.
Point two
Onboard Africans into the cooperative system, and give them financial and investment inclusion
Most people who are outside the financial system are not outside it because they have no money. They are outside it because the products were designed for somebody who earns differently from them. The union's second point is to build the entry that is missing — and to make it an entry into ownership, not only into saving.
Those are two different things and the union means both. Financial inclusion is having a record of your own money that you can see, and a loan you can qualify for by saving rather than by knowing someone. Investment inclusion is owning a piece of a real business — the part usually reserved for people who already have money. In this union that part costs ₦1,000 a share.
| What usually keeps people out | What the union's terms say |
|---|---|
| You need a large opening balance | An ordinary share is ₦1,000. The union has not published a minimum weekly saving, so ask the office what applies to you before you plan around one. |
| You need collateral or a payslip to borrow | Loan eligibility is 3 months of consistent savings. The qualification is the habit, and the habit is recorded week by week. |
| You have to travel to a branch to be served | Your cluster meets where you live, every Saturday at 5:00pm, and the entry is captured online the same day. |
| You never get to see your own record | Savings are captured online — daily, weekly or monthly — and shown in your own back office, which you open on an Android phone. |
| Ownership is for other people | Members subscribe 80% of the equity in each quarterly project; the cooperative funds the other 20%. |
What it looks like when it is working
A trader who has never held a bank product can name what she owns: her savings position, her share position, her loan status and her cluster, all on one screen she can open at the market. Nobody has to explain her own money to her.
A member who keeps twelve uninterrupted months has built something a lender would recognise — a written, dated, weekly record of saving — and the union honours it before anybody else does, because the union is the one that wrote it down.
Inclusion also has to survive a bad month. A member who misses Saturdays does not get thrown out of the union, but the run breaks, and interest and dividends both depend on the run being unbroken for twelve months. The union states that plainly rather than discovering it for you at year end.
Point three
Create jobs by building a new agricultural economy
Food production, food processing, food packaging, food distribution. Four stages, and this is the one genuinely sequential thing the union does: nothing can be packed before it is processed, and nothing can be processed before it is grown. The jobs the union is after are in the middle of that sequence, where most of the value is currently lost.
A farm that only sells raw crop sells at whatever the buyer offers on the day it must be sold, because the crop will not wait. A chain that can process, pack and move the same crop decides when to sell it. That difference is a business, and it employs people at every stage — which is why the union's third point is written as an economy rather than as a farm.
Production
Farms, and the work of gathering many small harvests into one lot big enough to sell properly. Cluster members are the growers here, and aggregation is what turns a hundred separate smallholdings into a supplier a processor will actually deal with.
Processing
Mills and lines that turn a crop which spoils in days into a product that keeps for months. This is where a harvest stops being perishable and starts being stock, and it is the stage that creates the steadiest work.
Packaging
Grading, weighing, sealing and labelling, so the product can be sold under its own name instead of being poured into somebody else's. A named product is the difference between taking a price and setting one.
Distribution
Storage and transport into the markets that will pay for it. This is the stage that turns product into cash — and what the chain earns is what a dividend can be paid from.
What it looks like when it is working
Less of the harvest is lost
Crop that would have gone bad waiting for a buyer is processed within reach of where it grew. The loss that used to be normal becomes stock somebody is paid to look after.
Work at every stage, not only at harvest
Production is seasonal. Processing, packaging and distribution are not. A chain that runs all four stages pays wages in the months when a farm alone would pay none.
The dividend has a source you can name
Money distributed at the end of the financial year comes out of what this chain sold — not out of what the next intake of members paid in. That is the whole difference between a cooperative and a scheme.
How a member takes a share of the chain
Each quarter the union opens a new stream of income on this chain. The cooperative funds 20% of the equity and members subscribe the remaining 80%. Shares are ₦1,000 each and the minimum subscription on any project is 100 shares — ₦100,000. Which crops, sites and projects are running has not been published; until it is, read the four stages as the shape of the plan, not as a report on work completed.
Point four
Promote industrialization in Africa, and encourage investment into critical sectors
Industrialization is a long word for something ordinary: finishing goods where the raw material already is, instead of exporting the material and buying back the product. The union's fourth point is to put member capital behind that, and to keep the plant it buys in the hands of the people who work near it.
The second half of the point — encouraging investment into the critical sectors of the economy — is what the union asks of members, not what it asks of governments. A cooperative cannot build a factory by wishing. It can, however, collect ₦1,000 at a time from people who have never been offered a share of anything, and put the total behind equipment that no single member could buy alone.
What it looks like when it is working
A processing unit stands close to the farms that feed it, and the cluster that supplies it also part-owns it. The people who grow the crop are not only the union's suppliers; they are on the share register of the thing that buys from them.
Equipment gets bought once and used by many. A machine that no smallholder could justify alone is affordable for two hundred members together, and it goes on earning after the subscription that bought it is long closed.
A member can trace a dividend to something physical. Not to a chart — to a building, a line, a lorry, a store they could go and stand next to. That is the test this point should be judged by, and it is a hard one on purpose.
Industry is slow, and slow is the honest part
Building anything industrial takes years and swallows capital before it returns any. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something else. The union has not published which sectors it has entered or what plant it holds; when it does, that belongs on the record, not in a headline.
Point five
Train members in a business school that teaches how to earn multiple streams of income
The Streams of Income Business School is the union's fifth point and its quietest one. It starts from a claim the union is willing to defend: wealth is predictable. It is built by people who understood a system and then repeated it, and making money is not as difficult as most people think.
What is difficult is doing it alone, with nobody to show you the working and no way to tell a real business from a story about one. A cooperative is already a room full of people who meet every week. Teaching in that room costs the union very little and changes what its members can do with the money they are saving.
The school teaches the system the union itself runs on: how to hold more than one income, how to read a business before putting money into it, how to put savings to work instead of leaving them idle, and how to explain all of it to somebody else — because a member who can explain it is the only kind who can bring another one in honestly.
“Making money is not as difficult as most people think. It is difficult to do alone.”
The teaching the school is built on
How streams and the school fit together
The union opens a new stream of income each quarter. Members activate the ones they want, then update their back office once a month by entering the next stream's referral link for confirmation — which is also what drives the union's campaigns, challenges and tasks. The school is where a member learns what they are activating before they activate it.
What it looks like when it is working
A member can name their streams
Not “I am in something” — the actual name of each stream, what it does, and what it has paid. Anything a member cannot describe in two sentences is something they should not yet have money in.
The monthly update is a habit
Entering next month's confirmation stops being a chore somebody chases you for and starts being the five minutes in which you look at your own position on purpose.
Nobody is recruited on excitement
A trained member introduces the union by showing the terms and the conditions attached to them. That is slower than excitement, and it is the only kind of growth a cooperative survives.
Attending is not earning
The school teaches; it does not pay. No class, attendance or qualification creates an entitlement to interest, a dividend or a return, and nothing taught there changes the terms printed elsewhere on this site. Where a school is, when it sits and who teaches it has not been published yet — ask the union office and expect a place and a time.
Check us
How to hold the union to any of this
A vision is worth exactly as much as the checks attached to it. So here is the check for each point: the one thing the union would have to publish before a careful person could call that point real, and its honest status today.
| Vision point | What would prove it | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Cooperative clusters | A list of the clusters, with where and when each one meets. | To be published |
| Financial and investment inclusion | How many members hold shares, and how many have completed twelve uninterrupted months of saving. | To be published |
| A new agricultural economy | The projects the union has funded on the food chain, with what each one produced and sold. | To be published |
| Industrialization | What plant and equipment the union owns, where it stands, and which project bought it. | To be published |
| The business school | Where the schools sit, when they meet and who teaches in them. | To be published |
| All five | Audited accounts for a completed financial year, ending 31 December. | To be published |
None of that is published today. That is precisely why this page is called our vision and not our results, and why the union prints the gap instead of decorating over it. Ask the office for any line in the table above, write down the date you asked, and hold the answer against what appears here later.
In the meantime, judge the union on what it has already put in writing: the share price, the equity split, the savings lock, the interest, the loan qualification and the dividend condition — each printed with the condition attached to it, in the same words, on every page of this site.
Empowering the members. Industrializing Africa.
Every point on this page begins the same way: one member, in one cluster, making one entry on a Saturday. There is no version of this vision that starts anywhere else.