"cooperatives" is correct and usable in written English
You can use it to refer to entities that are jointly owned and operated by a number of individuals, such as businesses or associations. For example: "The small business owners in the town formed a cooperative to buy supplies together at a lower cost."
Adisco has limited external financial support, and mobilises local resources through subscription fees for the health schemes and the sale of shares in cooperatives, among other initiatives.
These groups later coalesce into cooperatives to gain greater influence.
This week Niyonkuru's organisation Adisco was awarded the King Baudouin Foundation's African Development Prize for its work in encouraging entrepreneurship and creating cooperatives and health insurance societies to give Burundians more financial independence.
A crucial part of the drive to food sovereignty was the land reforms which switched 40% of farmland from state farms to incentive-based cooperatives.
Many cooperatives operate on a democratic basis, with decisions about matters large and small – from which colour to repaint a wall to how the cooperative invests any profits – voted on by its members.
It's a model that's been used across the pond for decades, and student activists are hoping that they can repeat the success of housing cooperatives in California and Canada over here.
"Barefoot" agronomists, just graduated, worked in rural cooperatives to invent organic fertilisers and pesticides.
Across the UK, student housing cooperatives are emerging as a way for students to bypass landlords and take control of their own accommodation.
Häagen-Dazs, by contrast, is made in two places in the United States, as well as in Canada, France and Japan.It is wrong to say that Ben & Jerry's social mission is just a drag on its commercial aspirations: after all, some of its customers shell out the extra cash for Rainforest Crunch precisely because it is chock full of righteously harvested nuts from tribal cooperatives in the Amazon.
Although the scheme is funded by government grants and funds are handled by intermediaries such as the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC), a state-run bank, each village pot is run by an elected local committee that has some discretion in setting loan amounts and interest rates.
Cooperatives, secular and religious, are doing much to ease the supply problems of the ordinary citizen and Teheran's chronic traffic jams are sorted out by volunteer traffic wardens.The Kurds in Teheran ever more vehemently repeat their pledge not to break away from Iran, even while ever more Kurdish flags appear in Kurdish areas of western Iran.
