New Regional Study to Track Women’s Leadership in Cooperatives in Asia and the Pacific
The ICA-AP Committee on Women is pleased to launch a regional decadal study, “Engendering Cooperative Data in the Asia-Pacific Region: Membership, Leadership and Institutional Enablers.” Commissioned under the JCCU Gender Project with support from the Japanese Consumers’ Co-operative Union (JCCU), Japan, the study aims to strengthen the evidence base on women’s participation and leadership in cooperatives across the Asia-Pacific region. 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 primary purpose of the study is to deepen understanding of the pathways, barriers, and institutional enablers that shape women’s leadership in cooperatives. While women form a significant share of cooperative membership across the region, their presence in leadership and decision-making roles remains uneven and, in many cases, underreported. 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 goes beyond counting membership. It seeks to capture ground-level insights from primary cooperatives across the Asia-Pacific region, alongside data gathered through apex cooperative organisations at the national level. Through this two-tier approach, the study will examine not only how many women are participating, but also how cooperative rules, policies, and organisational practices influence their access to leadership, their continuity in these roles, and their ability to return to leadership after interruptions in their careers or family lives.
We warmly invite primary cooperatives to be part of this regional effort and contribute to this repository of evidence based data set. Your participation will help bring forward real experiences from the field and ensure that the study reflects the realities of cooperatives at the grassroots level. By joining this initiative, cooperatives will contribute to a stronger regional evidence base that can help bring out actionable recommendations to shape more inclusive governance, improve representation, and strengthen women’s leadership across the sector. This is an opportunity for us to ensure that the voice of primary cooperatives is not only heard, but also reflected in future regional dialogue and action.
Primary cooperatives can access the survey through the link here. The survey can be completed at the respondent’s own pace and does not need to be finished in one sitting. Instructions on how to save and continue are provided on the first page of the form. The deadline for submission is June 01, 2026.
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.
Should you have any questions or require further clarification, please feel free to reach out to Ms. Nitya Shukla, Secretary, ICA-AP Committee on Women at nitya.shukla@icaap.coop or at women.secretariat@icaap.coop