Three officials, including a BDO involved in case of graft in Primary Agricultural Cooperative Society ( PACs), were arrested on Friday for allegedly accepting bribes in three Bihar districts by the state vigilance department. ADG (Vigilance) P K Thakur said Block Development Officer Vijay Prasad was apprehended on charge of accepting bribes of Rs 5,000 in Begusarai. Acting on a complaint, vigilance sleuths raided Navkothi block and caught the BDO Gupta red-handed when he was accepting Rs 5,000 ...

By Wambi Michael WAKISO, Uganda, Jan 30 (IPS) - For most Ugandan women, obtaining a commercial loan to start a business has been very difficult. Many do not have the required collateral of land title deeds and many cannot afford the interest rates charged by commercial banks. But six women-led rural banks have begun changing the lives of women in rural Uganda, easing their access to credit and enabling them to start small businesses and improve their food security. About 20 ...

Anis Chowdhury, Senior Economic Affairs Officer at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA), stated that the cooperative movement “has the potential to present itself as a viable alternative to the dominant economic paradigm”. He took part in the debate “The Way Forward”, on cooperatives and development organised by CICOPA in Cancun, for which he recently issued a message saying that it came “at a crucial juncture of the global ...