Shimelles Tenaw, who has made Finland his home, has been named one of Africa’s 50 most influential cooperative leaders. He received the honor in June at the ICA Africa Cooperative Excellence Awards 2026 gala, held in Maputo, Mozambique.
Tenaw serves as the Africa contact person for Kooperatiivi ry, the Finnish Society for Research on Economic Cooperation and Cooperatives. For decades he has promoted cooperative development in Africa while bringing Finnish cooperative thinking — rooted particularly in the Pellervo tradition — onto the international stage.
His connection to Finnish cooperatives dates back to the 1970s, when he came from Ethiopia to study at the University of Helsinki’s Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry. During his studies he interned at Pellervo’s Market Research Institute (PSM), and after graduating with a master’s degree in agricultural and forestry science he returned there as a researcher, staying until the late 1980s. He then moved to the University of Helsinki as a cooperative researcher.
His time at Pellervo gave him a broad understanding of the Finnish cooperative model and sparked the idea of applying it in developing countries, especially in Africa. He pitched the idea to Pellervo-Seura’s then-Managing Director, Aarne Hakala, who responded favorably. Tenaw describes this as the starting point both for cooperative development in Africa and for his own career.
Bringing the Finnish cooperative model to the world
A recurring theme in Tenaw’s work has been raising international awareness of the Finnish, and specifically Pellervo-based, cooperative model. In 2011 he served as secretary of Finland’s committee for the 2012 International Year of Cooperatives, helping prepare the launch event at UN headquarters in New York and presenting Finnish cooperative perspectives to an international audience.
Within Africa’s cooperative movement, he has actively taken part in regional assemblies and ministerial-level cooperative conferences, and has helped draft various recommendations and resolutions. Already in the 1990s he helped organize two major African cooperative seminars, presenting their outcomes at the ICA Africa region’s first general assembly in Nairobi in September 1994 — work that helped shape a shared African understanding of cooperative identity, which the ICA later formalized in its 1995 Manchester congress statement.
Tenaw has also served on the ICA Africa research and gender committee, and it was on his initiative that ICA Africa and Kooperatiivi ry signed a cooperation agreement in June 2018.
At the awards gala, ICA’s cooperative policy director Joseph Njunguja said Tenaw had earned the recognition for his significant contribution to the cooperative movement, both in Africa and globally.
Tenaw himself views his long relationship with Pellervo as a core part of his cooperative identity, saying simply: “I consider myself a Pellervo-person.”