ICA Coop

Replication Project: AfriCo Online from South Africa

AfriCo Online - Short for Africa Cooperatives Online.

The AfriCo online store is a marketplace for cooperatives in South Africa. This marketplace sources products from co-operatives and catalogs them for listing on the online store. AfriCo Online vetts and verifies all enterprises that wish to sell their products and services on the market place to confirm their co-op identity. AfriCo Online is made up of a team of eight (8) young people who also lead cooperative training and research programmes at the Africa Co-operatives Institute of SA. AfriCo Online offers the following to cooperatives and the South African public:

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A modern and competitive marketplace for manufacturing cooperatives.
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AfriCo Online has deliberate programmes to catalog and list products from women led co-operatives in response to the Gender Based Violence directed at women in SA.
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Open opportunities to other Southern African (Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Namibia) based co-operatives to sell their products to the South African consumer market.
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AfriCo Online will provide the South African consumer a choice in terms of buying clothes, food and other retail items. 
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AfriCo Online will lift the co-op identity amongst South Africans and will offer a socially responsible retail store alternative for consumers looking for better supply chains.

The online marketplace will be developed as part of this project.

Additional support needed

The team members of AfriCo online have skills ranging from management, marketing, operations and some knowledge of financial systems. The team however, can benefit from a small start-up grant of around EUR 1,500 that can cover the following:

  1. Branding
  2. Co-op vetting costs (already commenced with the SA Co-ops Association and Retail Network member co-ops)
  3. Professional photoshoots of products made by cooperatives
  4. Packaging samples
  5. Administrative fees

We welcome support from other cooperatives in branding, photoshoots and cataloguing. Our cooperatives network will provide warehousing and will coordinate couriering.