Islamic Cooperative App Idea to Facilitate MSME Financing Post-COVID-19. Islamic Economics Students from Airlangga University Won First Place in the 2021 ECCO Competition

The ECCO Competition is an essay competition held by the Management Student Association of the PGRI Dewantara Jombang College of Economics. This competition is regional, so participants are limited to those from East Java. Hafid and Arin learned about the competition through Instagram.

They chose the theme "Digital Sharia Cooperatives (D'KOS): An Application for Developing Sharia Cooperatives to Empower MSMEs Post-Covid-19." They chose this topic because they believe public enthusiasm for sharia cooperatives is quite high, so they thought about creating a Sharia Cooperative application. "We thought about creating a Sharia Cooperative application that could make it easier for the community to carry out their activities, especially helping with MSME financing, especially post-Covid-19," said Hafid.

During the essay writing process, they admitted there were no significant obstacles, but there were obstacles when making the presentation video. They explained that the announcement of the top 10 was not on schedule, as it was announced on the same day. On that day, they had to make a presentation video even though they had class and quizzes scheduled. "At that time, Arin and I had two classes and a quiz, so it was quite complicated, so we ended up juggling class, quizzes, and making videos until 11 p.m.," said Hafid. They stated that the video submission deadline was 11:30 p.m. They only finished editing the video at 11:00 a.m. and the saving and rendering process took a long time. They finally tried to ask for a little more time to submit the video. "In the end, because we spammed them, thank God our video was still accepted but got a mark deducted," said Hafid. They just resigned themselves and prayed that things would be better in the future.

The next day was the most hectic, according to them, because it had two concurrent schedules: the ECCO Competition Q&A session and the Competency Test.

"And the next day was Saturday, where we clashed with the first competency test. We had economics at 8 o'clock at that time, and the Q&A session started at 8 o'clock, and that was the most complicated point in my opinion because we both couldn't focus because we had to divide our concentration between the quiz and the Q&A session."

"Thank God, we got our turn quite late, which was around 11 o'clock and that too, if I'm not mistaken, it was an acmenbus quiz hahaha, but while we were waiting, we kept thinking about that, you know, so there was a feeling of anxiety."

When it was their turn to ask questions, they stated, "Thank God," that they were able to answer the questions fluently. However, there was one thing that surprised them.

"Finally, when it was time for us to ask questions from the judges, we were able to answer them fluently. What surprised me was that our idea was said to be brought or implemented directly at an Islamic boarding school in Malang owned by one of the judges. That was what surprised me, haha, and at the same time, I was very grateful," said Hafid

After completing the Q&A session, they simply waited for the announcement. Thankfully, they won first place in the 2021 ECCO Competition.