Speaking at the Sanasa International Exposure Visit Programme on Cooperative Business Model in Sri Lanka organized jointly by the Sanasa Foundation, India’s Centre for International Cooperation & Training in Agricultural Banking at the Hector Kobbekaduwa Agrarian Research & Training Institute in Colombo recently, he said Sri Lanka’s cooperative movement weathered many difficulties and faced challenges and succeeded in sustaining the momentum over the years.

He stressed that the International Exposure Visit Programme on Cooperative Business Model could bring in new impetus to rural cooperative banking sector.

The Cooperative movement in Sri Lanka has a long and rich history going back to the colonial period in the early 20th century. “We, in Sri Lanka had a system of sustainability in the old days, in every village, every community, even at the town and city levels,” he said.

He pointed out that the Cooperative system was created to fulfil the economic needs of rural farming community by granting loans. Later the rural working class set up their own credit societies and these cooperatives have gradually branched out to other sectors under the guidance of the government.

The Prime Minister praised Dr P A Kiriwandeniya for creating the SANASA banking system to help the rural small and medium entrepreneurs by providing them with credit facilities without having to go to the big towns to deal with big banks. We see how far SANASA and the Comparative system has come, as they have managed to create other ways to help each other within their community by support and loan systems during natural disasters like floods, landslides and tsunamis, he said.

The Prime Minister said it was significant that Dr Muhammad Yunus, who pioneered a new concept to empower the rural community through his ‘Grameen Bank’ model has been invited to form the Interim Government of Bangladesh and said that was a symbol of the success of rural cooperative banking movement.

“Among the pioneers of that movement are our first Prime Minister D.S. Senanayake, Wilmot A Perera, T B Subasinghe, A. Rathnayake and the socialist leaders like my father Philip Gunawardena, Dr N M Perera and others”. He recalled that his father propped the bill in parliament over 60 years ago to establish the 1st cooperative bank, and later it was named as People’s Bank, which was established by T.B. Ilangarathne. Today it is a major national bank with branches across the country.

Deputy Speaker of Parliament Ajith Rajapaksha, Dr Kiriwandeniya, Cooperative Banking sector leaders from India, Bangladesh and Nepal also addressed the inaugural function.