Worker Cooperatives – Part 4

This is the last installment in this series on worker cooperatives.

Sometimes one will find cooperatives where one would least expect to. This is the case with Arghand Cooperative in the heart of Afghanistan. The Arghand Cooperative was started by Sarah Chayes, who at the time was a war reporter for NPR during the NATO invasion after 9/11. While there she fell in love with the Afghan people and realized that they needed more than just talk but needed action and started a worker cooperative that produced soap using local materials.

The early days of her efforts were difficult. The most difficult challenge was negotiating the capitalist mindset of the US bureaucracy in a search of financial aid. Chayes turned to the Alternative Livelihoods Program, which is a branch of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), for financial start-up assistance. Though they were eventually able to win a contract essentially what she found was mountains of red tape and resistance.

Rather than sit around and wait for the US government to help Chayes and the Afghanis went ahead and started production. They learned how to extract seed oil and turn it into soap. With help from individuals around the world they gradually acquired the resources necessary to begin making sufficient amount of soap to export. Today the men and women of the Arghand Cooperative successfully sell soap and body oil in shops in both the United States and Canada.

To read more about the Arghand Cooperative go to: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/afghans

The web site for the Arghand Cooperative is http://www.arghand.org/