Further development and enrollment of My.Coop This project entails Agriterra's involvement in the further development and enrollment of My.Coop: training materials for cooperatives. Agriterra was one of the partners involved in the development of this training package. The objective of the training is to enable (existing and potential) managers of agricultural cooperatives to identify and address major management challenges that are specific to cooperatives in market oriented agricultural development.

The training package consists of one trainer’s manual and four modules:
1. Basics of Agricultural Cooperatives
2. Cooperative Service Provision
3. Supply of Farm Inputs
4. Cooperative Marketing
Modules and topics can be used independently from each other, in any given order, in line with the training needs.

My.COOP is also a website (www.agriculture-my.coop) where one can find not only the package but and concepts as well as selfassignments that help the self-learner to apply the contents to his or her own operative or situation.

In 2012 two online Training of Trainers (ToT) were organised, hosted and facilitated by ILO International Training Center (ITC). Several staff, agripoolers, consultants and clients of Agriterra participated in this ToT. The trainees who completed the course succesfully, are supposed to give the face-to-face My.Coop training to managers of cooperatives. After they have done this succesfully, they will become fully certified My.Coop trainers.

In the annual partner meeting early 2013 (with ILO, ITC, FAO, WFP and Agriterra), lessons learnt were generated, and on the basis of these lessons a work plan has been elaborated, with specific roles of each of the partners. This project entails the committment of Agriterra in the further development and enrollment of My.Coop.

During the annual partner meeting early 2013 in Rome the workplan 2013 of My.Coop has been elaborated, based on lessons learnt from 2012's implementation.

There was a 50% dropout rate which is high even considering the generally high dropout rates of distance learning courses. Evaluations of the ToTs implemented in 2012 raised the following issues:

1- Frustration with regard to expectations about the course. The My.COOP promotional materials are inadequate as participants of the ToT do not all understand that the course is a ToT and not a technical training on agricultural cooperative management. Many participants indicate that they were seeking training on cooperatives and rather than training on how to deliver technical training.
2- Selection of trainees for the ToT should be improved. There was now often a mismatch of participants’ expectations (see 1) and professional qualifications with the course objective and prerequisites. Participants were not in the majority trainers, but many wanted to learn more about cooperatives or have an overview of the package contents. 
3- Challenges with relation to time management. Participants were struggling to finish the course within the two months period (requiring a time input of 8 hours per week). Few can complete the activities and thus a reduction of assignments could be considered to maintain the course within the two month period. Due to the heavy workload of the trainees, they quickly fall behind on assignments and fail to catch up. This also cuases a decline of participant interaction in the discussion fora, which is meant to be an added-value of My.COOP. 
4- Technical and accessibility challenges especially for participants in rural areas. The challenges linked to technical accessibility and internet access discouraged participation.
5- Good interaction between ToT participants and interesting discussions. Except for those who are lagging behind (see 3). Partners recognized the potential of using / examing the discussion fora to identify areas and issues to enrich the content of My.COOP. 
6- Many participants found difficulties to follow the logic of the ToT and the relation with the My.Coop training materials and the various assignments in the ToT. The logic of the ToT could be improved, as well as the finetuning with the assignments and the My.Coop training materials.
7- Usefulness of the one-to-one interaction with tutors, but response of the tutors were felt to take too long sometimes.
8- The role of the facilitator could be improved, in better facilitating and summarising discussions. 
9- Participants felt that some topics were missing in the materials, such as gender, governance, financial management, etc. Instead of developing new modules on these topics, a first step would be to make inventory of existing training materials on these topics, and to link to these on the My.Coop platform. In this ways My.Coop platform could develop into a knowledge platform for agricultural cooperatives (although partners recognize that would require substantial resources including a knowledge management coordinator).
10- Several national adapatation processes are ongoing which generate commitment of national partners and in Latin America even institutionalisation of the My.Coop training into curricula and training programmes.

In the workplan (see files), Agriterra committed itself to the following activities:
1. General promotion of My.Coop (all partners) 
2. Identification of appropriate participants for next ToT (stricter selection criteria) (together with ITC, Agriterra will put less emphasis on it)
3. Enrollment of My.Coop; Use trainers having completed the ToT to implement training (highest priority)
4. Revise distance learning package (Make revisions in logic and fine-tuning) (through consultant and together with ITC)
5. Improve trainers manual (Key message and rationale) (through consultant)
6. National adaptations / additional language versions (Nepal, China, mobilisation of resources from third parties) (together with ILO and possibly FAO)
7. Co-financing translation and technical development of French platform development by October 2013 (together with ITC and ILO)
8 Identify existing key documents / tools to complement training modules in particular finance, governance, gender, post harvesting handling, storage, etc. (all partners)
9. First draft of concept note for resource mobilisation (together with ILO Lima)
10. My.COOP Latin America Coordination (together with ILO Lima and FAO)
11. Case study identification, extraction and development (in 2014)

The total available budget for this project is EUR 17,057. Activity 4 and 5 will be implemented by consultant Christian Gouet and financed under the project 5655.

Create training capacity among client organisations on cooperatives, cooperative service delivery, marketing, input supply etc,