"Cooperatives are based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, and solidarity and are autonomous associations of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically-controlled enterprise.
In 1970 in an attempt to capture the cooperative ideal to help mend an ethnically fractured state Guyana was declared a Cooperative Republic and both the traditional and modern forms of co-operation were emphasised." - Dr Henry Jeffrey