The Provost, Lagos State Cooperative College (LASCOCO), Akorede Ojomo has called for a concerted effort to tackle corruption in cooperative society and other organisations.
Ojomo spoke on Tuesday at a 4-day training workshop titled, “Leveraging on Digital Tools in Increasing Business Productivity,” held at LASCOCO premises.
According to him, “Concerted efforts must be made to curb fraud, stop it from the inception, from the budding level, you have to nip it and to ensure this, there must be continuous training and that is what this College is doing as a technology-driven institution and we are glad that in Lagos Cooperative Societies, the incidences of frauds are reducing and we will not stop until we get it right. If corruption prevails, there can’t be profit, there can’t be growth and development.”
Ojomo also explained that the training was part of the College’s capacity-building initiatives to equip Cooperators for maximum service delivery.
“What we are doing today is basically improving the decision-making process, exposing them to scientific ways of making business decisions. We are tired of using the rule of the thumb to make decisions, we have to go into the modern, technological, scientific way of arriving at crucial business decisions.,” he stated,
About 100 personnel from accredited Cooperative Societies are participating in the workshop.
Ojomo said that in line with the vision of the current administration of making Lagos a 21st-century economy, the Cooperative College which is already NBTE approved, has now been listed with JAMB and that registration was already ongoing.
He added that it has also signed a Memorandum of Understanding, MOU with the UK Cooperatives College in Manchester for exchange programme.
“The UK Cooperative College is over one hundred years old and there’s no way we want to get to the global level without learning from such an institution. The essence of the exchange programme is to expose our students to the best training in the world on cooperative studies and management in order to achieve and deliver on the College’s mandate of producing highly skilled manpower to the cooperative movement as well as create a platform and opportunities for Nigerians to develop and pursue a career in cooperative business activities,” he said.
According to the Provost, the MOU included capacity building of resource personnel of the College, while interested members of Cooperative Societies would also have the opportunity to visit their counterparts in the UK, where Cooperative movement reportedly started.
Ojomo stated that the objectives of the college were to improve the performance of bookkeepers and trustees of cooperatives societies operating in the state by providing relevant training for them; to be a college with high moral values, to provide high-level manpower with the capacity of self-employment and job creation, among others,
He said the training would equip cooperators and business owners with the right tools to increase profit margins and initiate a new stream of incomes effectively.
Ojomo stated that for a business to achieve its main objective effectively in record time, information technology would have to be effectively and efficiently deployed.
“In the next few days, we will be taking you through new ways of increasing productivity in business by leveraging on data; your data, that is there, untapped. On the first day, we will X-ray the tools, strategies, and techniques in business intelligence and how data can be used to make the right business decisions using google forms.
“Day two will take a deep dive into business opportunities in the Agro-business value chain, how to influence potential clients and customers using emotional intelligence and a guide to financial technologies (FINTECH) will wrap it up for the day. On the third day, we will talk about fraud detection and its prevention, trailing it will be, building a data driving business, and Turning competitors into losers.
“Finally, it will be far-fetched to rule out conflicts in the business environment and as such we intend to expose participants to conflict management and conflict resolution in cooperatives,” he explained.
