Moses Coady - Legacy

Legacy

The Board of Governors of St. Francis Xavier University established the Coady International Institute in Coady's honour less than six months after his death. The Institute has played a dynamic role in the emergence of credit unions throughout the world, especially in Africa. Since then, over 6,000 community development practitioners from over 130 countries have studied at the campus in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

Study clubs have been used widely in Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia in rural villages, and their method and approach anticipated the emergence of participatory rural appraisal in the 1980s and 1990s. Because study clubs increased the willingness and ability of poorer people to participate, they were one of the most significant innovations in credit unions since the first were formed by Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen in rural Germany in 1864.

Coady, like Raiffeisen, Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch and Alphonse Desjardins was part of a global movement in co-operative microfinance. Due to the poor performance of many community-based credit unions in the developing world, this movement lost its momentum in the 1970s, to be replaced by the more centralized approach characteristic of the microcredit movement. However, the main successes in microcredit have been confined to urban or very densely populated rural areas. In recent years there has been a revival of interest in village-based and participatory approaches, such as the SHG movement in India and the ASCA movement in Africa to address the problem of financial services for poor rural farmers.

The Co-operative Union of Canada under the leadership of George Keen spread both the philosophy and the tools of the Antigonish Movement widely across Canada. Led by co-operative entrepreneurs like Jake Siemens, adult education became a priority in western Canada with the foundation of the Western Co-operative College in Saskatoon in 1955. (1893-1952), the Assistant Director of the Extension Department under Coady, rose to national leadership in the Union in 1945, from whence he led an increasing international engagement on behalf of Canadians. Coady described MacDonald as a brilliant man, capable of organizing and maintaining a far-flung network of study clubs and cooperatives, who had a “keen and penetrating mind, always ahead of the people yet practical enough to keep within the range of what was possible. He was radical enough in other words to be progressive, and, conservative enough to be sane.”