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]]>Adding to the body of existing tools and training material on cooperative development, ILO now launches Think.Coop, a new training tool for those interested in cooperation and its benefits for improving businesses of potential members.
A great new initiative from ILO to encourage new cooperators!
Think.Coop is an orientation tool that helps participants understand how mutualism and cooperation can improve livelihoods opportunities. It provides the basics around the cooperative business model, and helps participants understand whether joining or forming a cooperative would be a feasible option. This one-day training tool uses a peer-to-peer, activity-based learning methodology, without an external facilitator or expert to guide the process. Instead, the participants work together as a team, following the simple step-by-step instructions for activities provided in the manual.
Think.Coop was tested in Cambodia among workers in the informal economy , and in Myanmar with farmers and rural workers . The manual is easily adaptable to different contexts, and it can be used as a first step in learning about the cooperative business model. Following the sessions on the importance of relationships, benefits of collective action, types of business structures and types and advantages of a cooperative, the participants are expected to have sufficient information to decide whether the cooperative business model suitable to them.
The manual is copyrighted under the Creative Commons licence. Hence it is free to use for non-commercial purposes, as long as the ILO is clearly attributed as the original source. For more information about Think.Coop, please contact [email protected] .
Further information
Publication
Think.COOP – an orientation on the cooperative business model [pdf 5542KB]
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]]>The post Cooperatives are responsible for almost 10% of world employment, new study shows appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Brussels, 25 September 2017 – CICOPA, the international organisation of industrial and service cooperatives, published today its second global report on “Cooperatives and Employment” [PDF]. .
For Bruno Roelants, Secretary General of CICOPA:
“Employment is one of the most important contributions made by cooperatives throughout the world. This report shows that people involved in cooperatives constitute a sufficiently high percentage to be considered as a major actor in the United Nations “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”, as well as in the worldwide debate on the “Future of Work” launched by the International Labour Organization. In addition, the intent of the study is to improve the methodology and the quality level of cooperative statistics. This is particularly timely, as the next International Congress of Labour Statisticians will take place in 2018. The public authorities and the cooperative movement itself should pay particular attention to this forthcoming event.”
Turning to qualitative aspects, the report also examines cooperatives’ specific contributions to addressing problems related to work and employment in the informal economy:
People working in the informal economy who join savings and credit cooperatives, mutual insurance cooperatives, multi-purpose cooperatives and consumer cooperatives have an easier access to credit, education and training, affordable goods and services to meet their basic needs and a certain level of social protection based on solidarity and mutual help.
Self-employed producers and entrepreneurs who join shared service cooperatives gain access to various services which help them to attain economies of scale and a higher bargaining power.
For the self-employed workers and freelancers who have considerably increased in number over the last decades, cooperatives could be used by trade unions or member based organisations as a tool to organize them, but could also provide innovative models which could guarantee both flexibility and protection.
Worker cooperatives, which aim at providing decent jobs to their worker-members, can be a direct solution to the formalization of informal employment.
However, to fully display the potential contributions of the cooperatives, “a favourable environment and an appropriate legal framework are necessary” and “the cooperative model should be better explained to trade unions, member-based organisations, NGOs and local governments”, concludes the report.
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