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The theme of the 81st International Cooperative Day draws our attention on the role that cooperatives can play in making development happen. Three years ago, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Millennium Development Goals, which includes the central objective of halving, by the year 2015, the number of people living in absolute poverty. In his recent report "Working out of Poverty", the Director-General of the ILO said that "poverty is a complex, deep-seated, pervasive reality. Virtually half the world lives on less than US$2 a day. More than 1 billion people struggle on $1 a day or less. And an even greater challenge lies beyond what statistics can measure - poverty breeds a growing sense of powerlessness and indignity, of being unable to think, plan or dream beyond the daily struggle to survive." |
We are convinced that cooperatives can play a central role in the fight against poverty. This has been demonstrated in the past when people thrown into extreme poverty by the adverse effects of the industrial revolution established the first cooperatives. The consumer cooperatives in Rochdale (United Kingdom), the workers' cooperatives in France, the Raiffeisen cooperative banks in Germany, Canada and Holland, the agricultural cooperatives in Denmark, to name a few, originated from the desire of excluded people to escape from abject poverty through organized self-help.
Participation and inclusion are central to a new approach to poverty reduction, and cooperatives are an ideal instrument in such a strategy. Meeting the challenges of globalization requires strong local communities, strong local leadership and strong local solutions. Cooperatives can meet these challenges by their closeness to local communities and their commitment to democratic leadership, good governance and social responsibility. The cooperative model have proven to be a key organizational form in building new models to combat social exclusion and poverty, for example, through local development initiatives. Cooperative members learn from each other, innovate together and, by increasing their control over their own livelihoods, build up the sense of dignity that the experience of poverty destroys. Cooperatives are indeed important features of rural life in many countries and an essential mechanism for building some degree of social and economic security. Savings, credit and insurance cooperatives provide poor people with affordable and appropriate financial services that are adapted to their needs and allow them to gain access to capital for investment, self-employment and community development.
The ILO has been supporting cooperative development since 1920, when a Cooperative Branch was established at its headquarters in Geneva. This commitment was renewed in June 2002, when the International Labour Conference almost unanimously adopted ILO Recommendation No. 193 on the Promotion of Cooperatives. Today, the ILO is witnessing a renewed, and still growing, interest among its constituents in the cooperative solution to the problem of poverty. This is why we celebrate with much optimism the 81st International Day of Cooperatives.
ILO Coop Branch, International Labour Office ILO, 1211 Geneva 22, Switzerland
Tel: + +41 22 799 7442 -- Fax: +41 21 799 8572 -- E-mail: ilo@ilo.org
Web site: http://oracle02.ilo.org/dyn/empent/empent.Portal?p_prog=C&p_lang=EN
Back to materials for International Day of Cooperatives, 2003
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Posted: 3 July 2003