What was the main takeaway for you from the ICA Global Co-operative Conference in New Delhi?
This conference, with over 1,300 participants from around the world, featured the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, and the minister of co-operation [this country has had a ministry of co-operation since 2021], which shows the government’s support for co-operatives. The conference has been an example of working together and adopting common views on the development of a model that is social, economic, environmental, and cultural that represents the co-operative movement we want to take forward.
I think we have a lot of strengths that we can take away from the ICA Global Cooperative Conference but perhaps the most important was the word “integration” – how integration between different regions, sectors and countries, with their cultures, visions and outlooks can make this movement. With a unique view and with a common house, the ICA, co-ops can provide answers to all the questions and challenges we face as humanity.
What should the International Year of Cooperatives achieve – and how is your organisation working towards that?
2025 has been declared the UN International Year of Cooperatives through a UN Resolution supported by United Nations member states. The first International Year of Cooperatives was celebrated in 2012, under the tagline ‘Cooperatives Build a Better World’.
Related: ICA Global Cooperative Conference: a round up
At the ICA, we welcome this gift the UN offered us, which is important because it builds on all the work we have done and continue to do with the UN. We decided to keep the same tagline from 2012 because we understood that we build that better world every day, facing global challenges with local solutions, with the daily work of every co-ops and co-operators. I think we made great progress in these 13 years, between the two international years but we still have along way to go particularly in terms of achieving this objective of being a model that goes beyond borders and aims to innovate and create, guided by the values and principles that unite us a global movement.
In this coming period we want to deepen relationships with international organisations. We have been working closely with the UN as well as UN bodies such as the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (Undesa), which are members of the Committee for the Promotion of Cooperatives (Copac), along with the ICA.
But we want to go forward in the future and have decided that we will attend important events such as COP30 in Brazil, which will debate the impact of climate change on our lives and what co-ops can do to find joint solutions. We will also participate in the second Social and Solidarity Economy Summit in Doha where we will also try to be among the keynote speakers. We will also continue to meet with the European Commission and organise joint actions with the ILO and FAO, through regional events. We are very interested in continuing to deepen these relationships and develop joint action plans with international and sectoral organisations.
You’ve recently published a new book. What motivated you to write it?
My latest book, Co-operatives in Action, builds on my previous book, Co-operative Principles in Action, in which I aimed to show the importance of putting principles in a action, facing global challenges co-operatively, not just carrying the principles like a heavy weight that prevents us from achieving our objectives.
In this second book, I aim to show 28 experiences I have had in different countries in the four ICA regions, to show that by putting these principles into action, these co-ops transformed the communities in which they are based. And I believe that, as we’ve been saying for a while now, while the challenges we face are global, the answers are local.
Over the past couple of years, I visited over 70 countries and met more than half of ICA members and I wanted to share this experience, which I have been very fortunate to experience first-hand, with ICA members, non-members and co-operators.
