In the summer of 2005, BARA researchers initiated the Latin American Coops Project funded by USAID under a subcontract to ACDI/VOCA, a Washington-based non-profit development firm. This five-year project seeks to document the impacts of cooperative organizational models on members, local communities, and local economies in four countries of Latin America-Brazil, Paraguay, Colombia, and Bolivia. In Brazil, four cooperatives in forest and cerrado regions of the Amazon Basin were studied by teams of graduate students. Following the Brazil fieldwork, the teams moved to Paraguay, and four more cooperative case studies were conducted. These data are now being analyzed in order to identify sets of change strategies that could enhance the performance of cooperatives as mechanisms of equitable development.

BARA Researchers:

• Dr. Marcela Vasquez-Leon
• Dr. Tim Finan
• Krisna Ruette
• Anita Carrasco
• Fernando Mayorga
• Jessica Piekielek
• Olga Lucia Cuellar
• Paola Canova
• Brian Burke