Reimagining NGO Relationships with Cooperatives

On her last commute, she sprained her ankle. Still, every morning in the beginning of the month, Lalmaya—the president of Milijuli cooperative—walks two hours down steep hills to reach its office. Halfway there, she pauses to rest, smiles through the pain, and says, “See, we have to have love, you know?” Behind her face, I see the resilience of enduring a lifetime of gender- and caste-based oppression as a Dalit in Nepal, yet continues to pour her passion into transforming the economic lives of women in her village through the collective power of the Milijuli Cooperative.

In Nepal, more than 34,000 cooperatives—known locally as sahakari—have sprung up over the past few decades. With principles democratic member control and economic participation, the cooperative stands apart from similarly ubiquitous organizations in Nepal: NGOs. NGOs have long been criticized for creating projects based on funder or philanthropists' interests and failing to reflect community’s needs. In theory, cooperatives—owned and governed by local members—should offer a stronger voice to communities and drive deeper social transformation.

During my month of fieldwork in rural Nepal to see the role of cooperative in community-led development, however, I saw a more complicated reality. What I didn’t know is that cooperatives in Nepal are deeply interconnected with NGOs through its funding, training and oversight. This article compares two women cooperatives: NGO led Atipriya Cooperative and self-formed Milijuli Cooperative. The comparison reveals how NGO involvement—or its absence—can shape members’ sense of ownership, leadership, entrepreneurship, and adaptability to change.

Atipriya Social Entrepreneur Women’s Cooperative in Bhimad

The story of Atipriya Social Entrepreneur Women’s Cooperative began in 2015 when INGO’s Nepal initiative came to the village. The NGO gave advice for the women in the community to start saving money as a group to establish a cooperative. Several women who shared the vision of improving their economic circumstances, began collectively joining mella,the household labor exchange system for agricultural tasks. Using this system, they could earn one hundred rupees for an hour of tiling other people’s cornfields. After a couple of months, they formed a cooperative to start offering loans for women for goat farming. The NGO provided various training and necessary materials to help initiate or improve goats management. Over the last decade, Atipriya Cooperative has grown to serve serve more than 400 members, built an office and adopted a more complex governance structure taught by the NGO.

In the NGO’s evaluation matrix, Atipriya Cooperative ranks among the highest in overall scores, including maturity and governance. Yet, during my conversations with its members, one thing kept troubling me: they did not seem to frame the cooperative’s establishment as the result of their own initiative. Instead, they often spoke about it in a passive voice. Whenever I asked why Atipriya Cooperative was formed, many replied, “Because (NGO’s name) told us to collect the money,” or, “(NGO’s name) said to open a cooperative, so we opened it.” Their answers pointed to compliance with the NGO’s external instructions.

This lack of sense of ownership and initiative is now having clear consequences. Over the several years, with support from the NGO, Atipriya Cooperative has brought about significant changes to the community. The community now has a non-extractive, trustworthy loan service, enabling members to start and expand their business effectively. Moreover, goat farming has significantly increased household income. The NGO’s contributed successfully for the function of the cooperative. By focusing on a single enterprise—goat farming—the NGO was able to concentrate investments and resources. This singular focus, paired with holistic support for all aspects of goat management, from livestock health to monetization, enabled local members to deepen their expertise and maintain improved practices long after the initial training. However, now, after a decade of the cooperative's operation, a community is faced with a new challenge. 

First of all, goat prices have dropped by half over the past few years due to market saturation. One woman shared: “During the peak time, there used to be 2–3 trucks coming every week to buy goats. But now, the price is low, and I’m alone—my husband is abroad. The more goats you have, the more grasses you need to cut for fodder. It was too much, so I sold most of them. Now I only keep four.” When I visited the areas, most women had already reduced the size of the farm. Alarmingly, as they scale down their goat- farming businesses, they are not taking up any alternative income-generation activities, but are instead reverting to the way they had lived before the NGO or Cooperative.

To diversify income sources in the village, the NGO recently introduced training on vegetable crops such as red pepper and ginger, and has even provided a turmeric grinding machine to encourage value-added production. However, few women participated. Many said they were already busy managing crops for subsistence. In addition, with most men working outside the village, these farming responsibilities have fallen entirely on women.The failure to adopt strategies for changing the economic and labour market shows that the NGO’s template business is not sufficient for women to continue to thrive in the shifting conditions. 

Milijuli Women’s Animal Husbandry and Agriculture Cooperative Organisation

After a week in Bhimad village studying at the Atipriya Cooperative, I moved to Dubar village to learn about Milijuli Women’s Cooperative. This cooperative offers a very different story marked by strong leadership, agency, and innovation.The story of Milijuli begins with Lalmaya Mijar, not an NGO. Growing up, Lalmaya felt deep frustration over the inequality between the poor and the rich in her village. She identified the root cause as the fact that poor people’s only option to escape poverty was to borrow money from the wealthy at high interest rates (3–5%), which only trapped them further in debt. After hearing about the cooperative model, she began talking to her friends about starting a women’s cooperative. With nine friends as founding members who shared her vision, Lalmaya went on to convince surrounding villages to form working groups and join the cooperative. Some villages were a two- to three-hour walk away, and she often had to make multiple visits to educate people. After 83 days of painstaking, passionate work, the 9 founding members successfully mobilized twenty-five people. These women started by saving five Nepali rupees each month and gradually increased the amount. Within a couple of months, they were able to offer low-interest, non-extractive loans. 

Over time, the cooperative grew from 25 to 400 members, established an office, and expanded its services and training programs. Another essential piece of Milijuli’s story is that the founder and current president, Shreemaya, along with five of the nine founding members, are Dalits. While neither Shreemaya, the former president, nor Lalmaya explicitly named Dalit empowerment as the cooperative’s primary goal, their focus on economic inequality naturally reflects caste dynamics, given the deep entanglement of caste and poverty in Nepal. Dalits women taking initiatives in creating an inter-caste movement is truly remarkable given how widely prevalent caste-based discrimination is in Nepali society to this day.

When I talked to members, it became clear that Milijuli’s members have a clear, grounded understanding of the cooperative’s purpose: to overcome economic inequity and foster women’s development in the village. This contrasts sharply with Bhimad, where members were preoccupied with goat farming and the NGO itself, which obscured the larger purpose of the cooperative.

When I walked around the village, I was surprised by diverse enterprises. In recent years, the Dubar village has prioritized red pepper production as a key economic strategy. Today, Dubar has more than four commercial-scale red pepper farms, along with three large chicken farms. One woman, who runs an egg farm while working full-time as a school teacher, taught herself the business and now supplies most of the community’s eggs. Another chicken farm is owned by the village storekeeper, who also runs commercial cucumber and tomato farms. The third belongs to my host family, who learned poultry farming through Milijuli’s training. Lalmaya Jee, a president of the cooperative, also introduced me to the only sheep farm in the village, with about seventy sheep. The wife in the farm has gained inspiration to start sheep farms through field trips hosted by a cooperative.Overall, livestock operations in Dubar are larger in scale than those in Bhimad.

Trainings and Field Work

What has Milijuli done that encouraged members to actively adopt new business strategies and thrive? 

One of the factors became clear during my fieldwork. When I attended two training sessions, I saw a familiar pattern: in both instances, a similar pattern emerged: the lecture had minimal visual aids with no photos, and little engagement. There was only a large sheet of paper on which the lecturer occasionally wrote key terms and some basic diagrams, which did not feel adequate to bring the concept to life. Moreover, the lecture style was entirely one-directional—there were almost no opportunities for discussion . At one session, when the male instructor asked women to recall a concept from the week before, no one responded until he scolded them. “none of you are paying attention, look at your notes” – that the participants reluctantly opened and recalled the concept. I noticed women falling asleep in the back row, or constant chatting which are signs of disengagement and disinterest. Later in Bhimad’s field work, I learned that the municipality is offering another 30 days of skill training in which women learn a variety of skills from constructing a toilet to mending your clothes. I asked a few women who attended the training what they had learned from that municipal skills training, they simply replied, “koi”—a vague, indifferent phrase that loosely translates to “I don’t know” or “not much.”

One member of Atipriya cooperative shared her critique of training, “There is so much training, from the municipality, NGO, and cooperative. But people who received the training are not doing anything. They’re not using the skills to help others.” The long history of NGO interventions has left behind a legacy of putting all the work of empowerment into training, often failing to shift mindsets or inspire real transformation.

Milijuli, however, offers an alternative: cooperative-organized field trips. Instead of top-down lectures, members themselves decide what skills they need, where to go, and who to learn from. This reflects a shift in power and agency—from being passive recipients or learning prescribed “solutions” to active participants who identify what’s lacking in community and learn skills. Many of the cooperative’s members who have been to field trips described the trips as feeling like a “girls’ trip.” Lalmaya Jee , a founder and president of the Milijuli cooperative even showed me a TikTok video from one of the excursions, featuring dancing and horseback riding. “It’s for a field trip, but why not go have fun too?” she said, referring to the joy of sightseeing, relaxing, and strolling. It’s easy to imagine how field trips were a type of learning that was vibrant, joyful, and sustained through genuine engagement—qualities that are often missing in conventional training.

Conclusion

I want to emphasize the urgent need to reimagine the relationship between NGOs and cooperatives. Instead of NGOs or funders defining projects based on their own interests—for example, some NGOs have targets to form a certain number of cooperatives, leading to forced creation—support and resources should be offered at the community’s request. Community members should be able to seek any form of assistance—whether technical or financial—and the NGO should respond by meeting those needs. If community members are unsure of their needs, NGOs should help equip them to hold discussions, solve problems, and make informed requests.

Before the establishment of the Milijuli Cooperative, the INGO Red Cross visited the village to conduct a participatory mapping workshop, during which villagers identified existing resources and unmet needs in the community. One outcome of the workshop was the realization of which households had toilets and which did not. This sparked collaboration among villagers to ensure that every household had access to a toilet. For families who could not afford to build one, the community requested financial assistance from the Red Cross. With the Red Cross covering half the construction cost, the village achieved its goal of installing a toilet in every household within a year. This story reflects an ideal dynamic in which community members not only absorb knowledge from NGO-led workshops but also act on that knowledge, demonstrating proactive problem-solving. It shows the NGO as a capacity-builder and resource that the community can draw upon to meet its own needs. 

An NGO funded by the Global North and operating in the Global South should base its model and philosophy on reparation rather than acts of generosity. The narrative among cooperative members should not be about “NGOs generously giving” but rather about the responsibility of the Global North—acknowledging that poverty and inequity were shaped by its actions, and that NGO support is a way to repair the harm.

This research was part of the Pitzer in Nepal Study Abroad Program, where I spent ten days in each village, both of which had active women’s cooperatives at their core.