In recent years a new type of association, the improvement union or ‘meeting’, has become common in Southern Nigeria. Associations of this kind may be formed on a lineage, clan, village, village-group, divisional, or tribal basis, and may carry out various economic, educational, political, social, and general improvement activities directly related to changing cultural conditions. The present report is concerned with the development of this kind of association in the Afikpo villagegroup of the Ibo-speaking people. Its growth in this section of Ibo country has been more recent than in the more central Ibo areas, where European contact has been of longer duration, a circumstance that has made it possible to study its initial development in detail.