ILO · COOP/SSE
Cooperatives and the Social and Solidarity Economy at the ILO
The ILO's COOP/SSE unit is less a project-implementation body than the global hub for rule-making, knowledge production and policy advocacy on cooperatives. For anyone following the cooperative economy, its greatest value lies in a continuously updated policy framework, statistical definitions, capacity-building models and country-level practice examples.
Six areas worth following over the long term
1) Global cooperative policy trends
Core anchors: Recommendation 193, the 2023-2029 SSE strategy, and national legal-reform programmes.
2) Cooperatives solving real problems
Formalising the informal economy, women's empowerment, platform-labour governance, community care and related issues.
3) Global data and scale
About 279 million people employed and roughly 1.2 billion members — the figures that anchor any serious account of the sector's global scale.
4) Capacity-building models
Think Coop, Start Coop, Manage Coop and My Coop offer ready-made, field-tested methods for cooperative development.
5) The SSE trend
The agenda is widening from cooperatives to the broader SSE: social enterprises, mutual organisations and platform cooperatives.
6) Country case samples
Sri Lanka's reforms, African agricultural cooperatives, Asian rural finance, women's cooperatives and more.
How ILO material is organised on this site
- Observation: global policy, country cases and data reports
- Methods: starting a cooperative, governance and financing, digitalisation
- Trends: the SSE, platform cooperatives and new digital forms of cooperation
- Themes: women, agriculture and the platform economy