Good Governance Practice for Better Performance of Community Organizations - Myths and Realities!!

The effectiveness of community organizations depends on the existence of pillars of good governance like, participation, accountability, transparency, predictability and rule of law. Effective participation of members in their organizations ensures the vigilance, which is essential to create sense of responsibility among the board and the personnel. This paper therefore, aims at assessing the governance practice and the impact of such governance practice on the performance of the community organizations (cooperatives) in Halaba district, Ethiopia. To address the objectives, 125 sample members from eight primary cooperatives have been identified by proportionate random sampling technique to collect the primary data with semi structured questionnaire. The collected data was analyzed using SPSS (version 20) and simple statistics such as mean, percentages and chi-square test were used to arrive the results. In addition, binary logistic regression model was applied to trace out the factors responsible for governance practice and the performance of cooperatives. The findings indicate that inadequate business participation, poor responsiveness, lack of awareness about the management, lack of democracy, corruption, poor sense of ownership, double responsibility and lack of members’ awareness were found to be the reasons for weak performance. The binary logistic regression model results show that, four predictor variables such as participation, accountability, transparency and rule of law are found to be significant on the impact of cooperative performance which needs due attention of the concerned stake holders to maintain good governance practice. It is suggested that the identified problems would be addressed through collaborative and deliberate action of both members and the government.