The ICA held its latest online members’ chat last week, focusing on the People Pillar of the Strategic Plan 2026-30, Practice, Promote, Protect.
ICA Communications Officer Paco Núñez, who led the session, said the pillar “is about strengthening leadership, supporting women and young people, building new skills, sharing knowledge, and preserving our cooperative heritage” and “investing in people to build a stronger cooperative movement”.
The first speaker was ICA Director General Jeroen Douglas, who said the apex has developed a “theory of change” based on “data that fuels advocacy, finance that enables future growth, people that drive engagement, and advocacy that creates enabling conditions for cooperatives to expand their reach and impact”.
In terms of “people”, that means strategic interventions that “prioritise women and youth in cooperative leadership and services”.
The ambitious goal, added Douglas, is to see “cooperatives trend as the most preferred business model” and to double the number of cooperative members worldwide.
Next, Dr. Rose Karimi, ICA Africa Regional Director, gave a presentation on the ICA Africa Women Entrepreneurship Program.
“We believe that when we invest in people, we strengthen cooperatives, and when we strengthen the cooperatives, we build stronger communities and more resilient economies,” she said.
A key part of this is investment in women leaders, with initiatives including this year’s Cooperative Leadership for Inclusive Economic Growth and Democratic Governance training, supported by the ICA-EU partnership. Through this, said Dr Karimi, five women leaders from across Africa were given training based on leadership, governance, and management skills in order to better lead their institutions.
“To sustain this leadership pipeline,” she added, “we have also awarded 15 scholarships to women cooperative leaders to undertake a leadership for change program at the Cooperative University of Kenya.”
Supported by the partnership with We Effect, this “is equipping the leaders with skills and confidence that they need to drive democratic governance and institutional transformation within their cooperatives,” she said. The current cohort is set to graduate in November.
To further drive inclusion, ICA Africa last year launched the framework for the establishment of national cooperative gender platforms, added Dr Karimi. This has been adopted by Kenya and Senegal, with the latter inspiring other Francophone African countries to consider following suit.
In terms of investing in the next generation of leaders, ICA Africa is implementing the Africa Cooperative Entrepreneurship (ACE) program, also funded through the ICA-EU partnership. “We have selected or initialised a selection of 15 youth from across the continent that will meet in August in a boot camp in Lusaka, Zambia, to continue the same coaching and mentorship, and we believe that this is also going to establish more youth-led cooperatives across the continent,” said Dr Karimi.
The next speaker was Harsh Sanghani, President of the International Cooperative Alliance Youth Committee (ICA YC). Workshop events have shown that youth “don't want to watch our governance – they want to be a part of it”, he said.
To that end, the Youth Committee has set up a working group to give young cooperators experience of duties and responsibilities. This is a “standing pipeline”, said Mr Sanghani, which “puts young cooperators directly inside ICA processes, working alongside the institution, not waiting outside it for an invitation”.
He praised the ICA for giving the Youth Committee President a Board place with a vote. But what is required now, he added, is co-branding and platform support for the Global Youth Cooperative Leadership Summit; a defined path to ICA governance discussions; seed funding so the committee’s work is not run on a volunteer basis; and visibility before the ICA General Assembly in Panama, “so members arrive in September already knowing that we are doing an amazing thing for youth”.
Xiomara Nuñez de Cespedes, Chair of the ICA Gender Equality Committee, said cooperativism offers a means to improve women’s livelihoods, citing the example of a Dominican nursing professionals cooperative.
“We went from having miserable salaries to gradually improving through collective effort,” she said, “aiming at one single objective, which was to improve and transform the reality of each one of our members.”
There is still a long way to go, she added, but “when we talk about women and cooperatives, we are talking about a heartfelt reality that has allowed women to develop their leadership.
“We have made a huge effort from the Gender Equality Committee to show women that it is possible through organised leadership, through a leadership form based upon the principles and values of corporatism, to progress.
“We hope that the next decade allows us to become a foundation for that development. There will be no sustainable development, no compliance with the Sustainable Development Goals, if we don't have the involvement of all men and women in the world.”
Monalisa Kashyap, Program Coordination and Advocacy Officer for the ICA-EU Financial Framework Partnership Agreement at ICA Asia-Pacific, talked about capacity building and knowledge development under the partnership, with initiatives including the launch of the Pacific Island Cooperative Network.
This has a focus on cooperatives as “drivers of the blue green economy”, she said, and addresses “the absence of a unified Pacific mechanism for people to come together to share and amplify their priorities”.
A steering group is now in place, with representatives from island nations such as Kiribati, Fiji and the Solomon Islands, and support from cooperative apexes in Australia and New Zealand, and upcoming events will help to create a more formalised, recognisable network.
Marc Noel, Director of Partnerships at the ICA, talked about a cross-border initiative, Mapping International Cooperative Development Programs (MICDP). This offers an online source which maps international cooperative development programs and showcases their impact, along with contact details, status updates, and details of implementing partners, donors and objectives.
MICDP currently features 450 programs in around 80 countries, in sectors ranging from renewable energy to agriculture to food security and housing.
Finally, Paco Núñez presented the Cooperative Cultural Heritage Program (CCH) to identify key sites for the movement around the world.
“Our goal is to continue growing this global map, so we can better reflect the diversity of the cooperative movement around the world,” he said, inviting the movement to make submissions.
