In the fifth in our blog series to celebrate the International Year of Cooperatives, Oikocredit shares lessons from five decades of supporting cooperatives, what makes them unique, and what we can learn from one of the largest client surveys in the impact investing industry.
“Cooperatives build a better world” is the rallying cry of the UN’s International Year of Cooperatives. Running throughout 2025, it calls attention to the role of these member-owned businesses in reducing poverty, building economic resilience and creating inclusive, sustainable development.
But slogans aside, what does “better” actually feel like to small-scale farmers in Africa or business owners in South America? Cooperatives are well placed to answer that question, as inherently democratic organisations with members that jointly set policies and make decisions. Enshrined in their structure is a responsibility to act in members’ best interests: by being transparent, equitable and accountable.
In other words, they do this by driving concrete improvements in the daily lives of their communities. As former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon put it, “Cooperative endeavour is about empowerment, inclusion and sustainability…no-one should be left behind.”
Building Financial Stability, One Investment at a Time
As an impact investment cooperative, Oikocredit has understood the crucial role financial stability plays in improving lives and livelihoods for 50 years. From our founding in 1975, when the world was facing apartheid in South Africa and the ravages of the Vietnam War, a group of church activists took practical steps to improve people’s lives. Their action strategy was to pool investments into a cooperative and then put that money to work for communities outside the reach of mainstream banks.
The results of this alternative investment approach have been proven repeatedly over the years. Within a few years, development organisations had acknowledged the importance of “banking the unbankable”. Since then, Oikocredit has built on this momentum. Over the past five decades, it has disbursed EUR 5.8 billion to support 2,240 partner organisations across 75 countries, helping extend access to finance for millions of people who live on low incomes, particularly women and rural communities.
Tracking Hard Metrics for Investor Clarity
Another common question has motivated Oikocredit over these years: how could we track the impact of our work? Aside from being recognised by the development finance sector, how can we truly ascertain that investors’ capital wasn’t just moving money, but actually moving lives? The need to measure our outreach and its on-ground effects led us to launch the Outcomes Programme in 2014. We did so to create a structured accountability, but also to provide our investors and partners with clarity and corroboration. After all, transparency is fundamental to a cooperative’s work.
The Outcomes Programme has helped 25 partners build outcome tracking into their own systems, encouraging long-term ownership. It has shown the importance of integrating widely dispersed – and often siloed – data in a systematic way. A second learning was the need for stronger staff support to measure what really matters. Third, it has shown the need for tools to support data collection and visualisation.
Armed with these lessons and supported by buy-in from their partners, Oikocredit went one step further in 2021, launching the Client Self Perception Survey. The collaborative programme is the biggest exercise of its kind and reflects Oikocredit’s cooperative spirit. Not only are questions tailored to each partner’s specific needs, but it also means we can discuss available data collection options and offer our partners a choice of method, to align with their capacity and interests. Survey results are analysed together with complementary internal information from partner organisations, combing both external data and internal knowledge work together to inform understanding.
By listening to end-clients on key areas such as business, savings, health, education and digital access, the programme helps partners tailor services to improve client outcomes. It also strengthens Oikocredit’s ability to report on outcomes and impact to investors, our cooperative members, leadership and our board.
Perhaps most important, the process of talking to micro-borrowers, people on low incomes and other end-clients identifies future action areas, enabling partners to adjust their strategies and interventions to better achieve their aims. Oikocredit also works with partners to improve their products and services in response.
Designing Financial Services in Cooperation with Stakeholders
Armed with firsthand feedback from this cooperative learning platform, organisations can tailor their services – for example offering financial education, flexible loans or weather insurance – instead of following a one-size-fits-all business model.
The 2024 edition of the survey asked more than 48,000 of Oikocredit’s partners’ customers how their lives have been affected, and more than 80% reported their lives had improved thanks to support from partner organisations – many of which are cooperatives. For these people, “better” translates into things like higher household savings, increased income, and being able to cope with unexpected expenses. These gains are the essence of “better” for many: having a secure way to save means that families can handle health bills or emergencies without sinking deep into debt.
One representative finding was that clients who built up any savings were much better able to manage medical costs and emergencies such as crop failures. So ‘better’ banking, for them, means real financial resilience. It means putting food on the table, keeping children in school, or not worrying about a sick family member.
“Better” for cooperative communities, then, means more income and savings, greater resilience and supportive services tailored to real needs. It also means lower costs and higher trust, as we see with cooperative-style solidarity groups: surplus funds are often reinvested, deepening both financial and social return.
“Better” can also mean other kinds of support. For example, people with access to clean energy (through the cooperative process) reported higher incomes and quality-of-life improvements: solar power at home, irrigation pumps for farmers, or training programmes.
Worrying, but rather unsurprising, was the impact of extreme weather. The results of climate change continue to have a disruptive effect on many clients’ earning abilities. With a majority (76%) of those who were asked about climate change experiencing income disruption, there is a pressing need for climate-resilience programmes.
Survey insights have led to practical action. Some organisations partners have rolled out environmental performance training and launched climate resilience measures, including local weather alerts, financing for water infrastructure, and tailored loans for farmers. Others are rolling out digital and financial literacy sessions, automating loan processes to cut wait times and exploring ways to support better household water and sanitation outcomes.
We Must Put Real-time Needs at the Heart of Inclusive Finance
As a cooperative, Oikocredit understands that for the people we and our partners serve, “better” is tangible: it’s having enough savings to face a crop loss, being able to improve a small business or knowing the bank is on their side. By gathering feedback and focusing on those real-world goals, cooperatives can measure their own success by client success. They can live up to the promise of doing finance differently: putting people first and pumping resources back into making members’ lives better.
In this International Year of Cooperatives, “better” means putting people’s needs at the heart of inclusive finance. When thousands of people say, “we’re getting better,” the whole financial system can become stronger and more resilient. And when we truly listen and reinvest into the communities we serve, we sharpen our impact and build durable trust on the ground, ensuring no one is left behind.
Oikocredit is a social impact investor and global cooperative celebrating 50 years of impact investing in 2025. Since 1975, Oikocredit has provided funding to organisations active in financial inclusion, agriculture, renewable energy, and community resilience.
Through loans, equity investments, and capacity building, Oikocredit supports partners across Africa, Asia, and Latin America to improve the lives of low-income people sustainably.
As of 31 March 2025, Oikocredit has over 46,000 investors and finances 472 partners with a development financing portfolio of €1,045.2 million.
