The International Cooperative Alliance Asia-Pacific Committee on Women has launched a survey to strengthen the evidence base on women’s participation and leadership in co-ops across the region.
The Engendering Cooperative Data in the Asia-Pacific Region: Membership, Leadership and Institutional Enablers survey has been commissioned under the Japanese Consumers’ Co-operative Union (JCCU) Gender Project. It builds on two earlier regional studies conducted in 2005 and 2015-16 and marks an important step forward in understanding how women move from membership into leadership positions.
The study aims to deepen understanding of the pathways, barriers, and institutional enablers that shape women’s leadership in co-ops.
”While women form a significant share of co-operative membership across the region, their presence in leadership and decision-making roles remains uneven and, in many cases, underreported,” says the committee. ”This study will help close that gap by generating comparable, gender-disaggregated data that can support advocacy, policy engagement, and stronger programme design.”
The study intends to capture ground-level insights from primary co-operatives across the Asia-Pacific region, alongside data gathered through apex co-operative organisations at the national level, to examine how many women are participating and how co-operative rules, policies, and organisational practices influence their access to and participation in leadership.
”We warmly invite primary co-operatives to be part of this regional effort and contribute to this repository of evidence-based data set,” says the committee. ”Your participation will help bring forward real experiences from the field and ensure that the study reflects the realities of co-operatives at the grassroots level.”
The findings of the study will be presented at the Fourth Regional Conference on the Status of Women in Cooperatives in Asia-Pacific, scheduled for December 2026 in Tagaytay, Philippines.
Primary co-operatives can access the survey here. deadline for submission is 30 June. If you have any questions, please contact Nitya Shukla, secretary, ICA-AP Committee on Women, at [email protected] or at [email protected]
