Food security expert Dr. Fadel ELZUBI considered the Cabinet’s decision to establish the Cooperative Development Fund—designed as a banking and financial window for cooperatives that attracts donor support and organizes its grants and lending—alongside the creation of the Cooperative Development Institute stipulated in the Cooperative Law to build the capacities of cooperatives, their members, and the institution’s staff in line with International Labour Organization curricula adapted to the Jordanian context, to be a decision in its proper place.

He noted that the real obstacle facing the cooperative movement in Jordan has never been a lack of legal texts. Successive laws, most recently the Cooperative Law of 2025, a national strategy for the cooperative movement, and international recognition culminating in Jordan’s election to the Board of the International Cooperative Alliance for Asia and the Pacific, all exist. The actual constraint lies in the small capital base, weak financing eligibility, and limited administrative capacity.

ELZUBI stressed that the figures reveal the challenge clearly: Jordan has about 1,445 cooperatives with total capital of nearly 90 million dinars and around 127,000 members. This means the average cooperative capital does not exceed 63,000 dinars, and the share per member is no more than 710 dinars. Such scale does not provide the cooperative movement with an economic base capable of negotiating in value chains, nor a creditworthiness that the banking sector can treat on commercial terms. Most entities are small, undercapitalized, and many are not genuinely active.

He explained that the true test for the Fund begins with a fundamental question: does it enter a mature market lacking only financing, or an unprepared market lacking something deeper than financing? The honest answer, he said, is the latter—injecting money into an unqualified structure produces not development but dispersed failure.

ELZUBI identified four design risks that must be addressed in forthcoming regulations:

1. Mixing grants with loans: entrusting one entity to both grant aid and lend money to the same group creates direct moral hazard, as beneficiaries may treat loans as deferred grants. Institutional separation of the two windows, with distinct accounts, governance, and eligibility criteria, is not a technical detail but a survival condition for the Fund.
2. Dependence on donors as the main capital source: external funding is volatile, implicitly tied to agendas not always aligned with national priorities, and tends to withdraw when most needed. The Fund must be anchored in local capitalization—an allocation from the treasury as founding capital, a defined share of cooperative surpluses, and a credit guarantee mechanism enabling banking leverage—while donors remain partners, not the backbone.
3. Conflict of roles within the Cooperative Institution: when the same body acts as regulator, supervisor, financier, and trainer, governance collapses. A regulator that lends to those it oversees cannot enforce rules without exposing its own portfolio. He called for an independent board of directors, audited and published financial reports, and a disclosure policy on defaults.
4. Financing the wrong entities: a significant portion of registered cooperatives are inactive or nominally active. Entering with financial products before strict sector classification—distinguishing active, struggling, dormant, and those to be struck off—means funds will go to those skilled at writing applications, not those skilled at managing projects. Cleaning and classifying the cooperative registry is a prerequisite, not a follow-up.

Regarding the Cooperative Development Institute, ELZUBI considered it the more important half of the decision, as it addresses causes rather than symptoms. He warned, however, against it becoming a training workshop machine measured by the number of trainees and courses rather than actual impact. While ILO curricula are sound and their adaptation to Jordan appropriate, training that does not translate into measurable improvement in cooperative financial performance remains expenditure, not investment. He proposed that the Institute be held accountable to three metrics: increased proportion of cooperatives submitting audited financial statements, improved survival rates of cooperative projects after three years, and higher member incomes.

He argued that the Fund’s real value lies not in consumer lending or microfinance—already crowded markets—but in financing what individual farmers cannot fund alone: aggregation, sorting, grading, cold chains, storage, collective marketing, and contract farming. These are the missing links between small producers and the market, and precisely the space cooperatives historically exist to fill. The same logic applies to the water sector: water user associations, if financed and properly governed, are the most realistic tool to raise irrigation efficiency at basin level in a country at the threshold of absolute water poverty. Here, the decision intersects with the water–energy–food–environment nexus, the very space where lending priorities should concentrate.

ELZUBI affirmed that linking the Fund to the Economic Modernization Vision and the Public Sector Modernization roadmap is correct in principle, but remains rhetorical unless translated into a sectoral investment portfolio with defined priorities, rather than a window that merely receives applications and disburses funds as they arrive.

He concluded that the real test will not be the Cabinet’s decision itself, but the regulations and instructions to follow. He suggested execution should be judged by five outcomes: a published classification of the entire cooperative registry; complete separation between grant and loan windows; an investment policy prioritizing aggregation, marketing, and water efficiency projects; independent governance of the Fund with external published audits; and an annual report on the cooperative sector with verifiable data. He emphasized that the cooperative movement in Jordan is not marginal but one of the few tools available to broaden income bases in the governorates, empower rural women economically, and organize small producers. Yet it has long remained below its potential. The recent decision offers a genuine opportunity, though whether it becomes a real chance or merely another spending cycle depends on design details, not on headlines.