Tagaytay +30: Three Decades On, the Movement Returns to Where It Started
The International Cooperative Alliance Asia and Pacific (ICA-AP) and its Committee on Women will hold Tagaytay +30, the Fourth Regional Conference on the Status of Women in Cooperatives in Asia and the Pacific, from 1 to 3 December 2026 in Tagaytay City, the Philippines, under the theme “Women, Leadership and Change: Shaping the Future of Gender-Responsive Cooperatives.” The conference is organised under the ICA–EU Financial Framework Partnership Agreement (FFPA), with support from the ICA–JCCU Gender Project and in collaboration with the National Confederation of Cooperatives (NATCCO). The venue carries a historical significance: in May 1997, the first Asia-Pacific conference on “Women in Decision-Making in Cooperatives” was held in the same city, co-hosted by ICA-AP and the Asian Women in Cooperative Development Forum. The conference produced the Tagaytay Declaration and Platform for Action calling on cooperatives to substantially increase women’s participation in leadership and governance.
The Declaration has been revisited twice since: Tagaytay +10 in 2006, which reviewed a decade of gender integration and flagged the need for gender-responsive bylaws, training and data systems, and Tagaytay +20 in 2016, which took stock of women’s roles across the region’s cooperatives and issued recommendations on leadership development, youth inclusion, gender budgeting and men’s engagement.
Tagaytay +30 will bring together women cooperative leaders and policymakers, young cooperative leaders, members of the ICA-AP Committee on Women, researchers and development partners. The programme will move from reflection on the past decade and new regional evidence, including findings from the updated study “Engendering Cooperative Data in the Asia-Pacific Region: Membership, Leadership and Institutional Enablers”, towards a shared agenda for the decade ahead, closing with a Tagaytay 2026 Commitment Statement.
Click here to read more about the study. Further details on the programme and registration will follow.