When the P&V cooperative insurance group decided to double in size through the purchase of the brokers channel of INGs Belgium operations, it didn’t realise the Global Financial Crisis was about to descend upon it. If anything demonstrates the resilience of the cooperative insurance model, that moment was it. It took place on the eve […]
SSVMN has it covered in Costa Rica
It was a rural schoolteacher, Alejandro Rodríguez, who first raised the idea of a social institution in Costa Rica. The year was 1920 and the country was fresh from the unhappy reign of military dictator General Federico Tinoco Granados. After Granados was overthrown, the unpopularity of his regime led to a considerable decline in the […]
Patti Carpenter on the Value of Women in Cooperatives
With her keen sense of Western consumer preferences, Patti Carpenter, president and creative director of New York Citys Continuum Home, Inc./Carpenter + Company, works with artisans in emerging markets to design products that can be produced using indigenous forms and methods, and then she pitches them to such well-known retailers as Bloomingdales. Through organizations like […]
Clean Water, Cooperative Principles
Rapid urbanization around the world is greatly increasing pressure on public water utilities, meaning that getting clean drinking water and safely disposing of waste can be some of the biggest problems facing city-dwellers in developing countries. One Bolivian success story has shown how cooperatives might provide an alternative way for urban communities to get clean […]
Four Thousand Three Hundred Kilometers of Credit
Bounded by some of the earths most dramatic landscapes, Chile, a thin lance of land, stretches four thousand three hundred kilometers down the western edge of South America. The trembling, volcanic Andean Cordiera, home to some of the highest peaks in the world, forms the country’s eastern border. To the west, large cold Pacific Ocean […]
Uniting India’s Fishing Cooperatives
India’s long coastline and rich inland waters means that fishing is a major industry in the country, with over 14 million people involved in fishing and aquaculture. Fishing communities, however, are among the weakest in society, suffering from illiteracy, poverty and lack of knowledge about technology. Many fishermen are exploited by middlemen, but cooperatives can […]
Transportation Co-perative Connects People
The transporters co-operative Tucura Ltda – COOTRANSTUR was founded on 13th September 1976 and named after Tucura, an indigenous tribe that lived in the region of the upper reaches of the Sinú river. They transported timber and corn by rafts which slid down the river Sinú pushed by its currents up to the river ports […]
The Cooperative Watching Over Swiss-Italian TV
For 74 years, CORSI, the cooperative for radio and television in Italian-speaking Switzerland, has been overseeing public radio and television programming in the Ticino Canton. In an era when television has a massive influence on democracy, the cooperatives experience offers a fascinating story. The cooperative was founded in 1938 with the aim of increasing transparency […]
Connecting Clients and Communication Cooperatives
French businesses can now connect with a network of communication cooperatives to find exactly the communication skills they need, in any media, provided in a fair and ethical way. MADEinSCOP is a multi-channel hub linking 200 cooperatives in the communication sector and forging connections between clients and cooperatives. We’ve got human values, we believe in […]
Transforming African Farmers into Cooperative Entrepreneurs
Mozambique sits on the coast of southeastern Africa, blessed with fertile soil, but suffering the effects of difficult transportation and little communication infrastructure in its rural areas. 81 percent of its population contributes to its agriculture production, which amounts to nearly one third of the countrys GDP. Since 1995, CLUSA International (CLUSA), a program of […]