CICOPA Asia and Pacific convened its annual meeting on 25 November in Colombo, alongside the 17th ICA-AP Regional Assembly. Member organisations from across the region, including BCCM (Australia), ICCIC (China), SEWA Federation and ULCCS (India), ICC (Iran), JWCU (Japan), ULSCC and ACDI (Philippines), came together to exchange updates and explore how worker cooperatives can shape a more inclusive care economy.

The meeting opened with members sharing their activities over the past year, offering a diverse picture of how worker and social cooperatives are responding to changing labour markets, social protection gaps and community needs. This round of updates helped to identify common challenges and opportunities for joint work in the region. A central focus of the discussion was the theme of worker cooperatives and the care economy.

In her keynote address, Ms. Diana Dovgan, Secretary General of CICOPA, underlined the growing role of cooperatives in a context of rising demand for care services, worker shortages, and persistent inequalities. She highlighted three models through which cooperatives are engaging in the care economy, worker-owned care cooperatives that improve job quality, women-led cooperatives that formalise and empower female caregivers who are often informal workers, and multistakeholder cooperatives that co-design care services with families, workers and local communities.

Building on this framing, Mr. Karl Coombe from the Business Council of Cooperatives and Mutuals (BCCM) shared insights from the “Care Together” project, a collaboration between BCCM and the Australian government to strengthen cooperative and mutual solutions in care. His presentation illustrated how policy support, partnerships and cooperative models can work together to improve both service quality and working conditions.

Participants then engaged in a lively exchange on how these approaches resonate in their own countries and regions, and how CICOPA Asia and Pacific members could learn from European cooperative experiences through online workshops and study visits. Such an initiative would not only deepen technical knowledge on cooperative care models, it would also serve as a practical example of cooperation among cooperatives within the CICOPA network.

The meeting concluded with a shared commitment for CICOPA Asia and Pacific to work closely with ICA Asia and Pacific on its ongoing initiatives on the care economy under the ICA EU project, positioning worker cooperatives as key actors in building fair, people centred care systems in the region.