Land Shareholding Cooperatives centralize management over fragmented farmland by converting farmers’ plots into shares. While these cooperatives have been widely successful in boosting agricultural commercialization among rural smallholders in China, their potential has not yet been recognized in the African context. To fill this gap, this paper presents and discusses a theoretical framework based on recent literature, an in-depth case study from Uganda and quantitative analyses of data on horticultural cooperatives from Senegal and agricultural and livestock cooperatives from Uganda, Malawi, Madagascar, Rwanda and Kenya.