Strategic Analysis of Production Cooperatives Contribution to Microfinance and Job-Creation in Fars Province

The Objective of the present study is to examine strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats concerned to Fars province agriculture and nonagricultural production cooperatives in providing goals of microfinance and job creation (employment). The data used for SWOT analysis comes from a survey of 40 cooperatives’ executive directors. Main and secondary factors were determined using Analytic Hierarchy Process. Internal and external factors evaluation matrix showed that cooperatives were in a moderate position in attaining the above mentioned goals. Pair-wise comparison revealed that opportunities with weight of 37 percent were the most important factors followed by weaknesses with weight of 31 percent. Strengths considered less important with weight of 9 percent and threats got weight of less than a quarter. Final scores obtained for secondary factors were used to determine strategy priorities and their contribution to strategy implementation. Based on the attractiveness score, an insignificant difference was found among strategies. Opportunities received the highest contribution to all strategies while the lowest contribution was assigned to strengths. It was also discovered that weaknesses were comparatively more important than threats. Among the opportunities’ “well-educated- experienced labor” and “government support for cooperatives and job creating activities” showed the highest contribution to strategies. The most significant factors of weaknesses and threats were “fluctuating and low output prices” and “lack of mechanism to accumulate cooperatives members’ saving”, respectively.