PICON: A New Network Is Taking Shape Across the Pacific

At ICA’s Members’ Chat on 14 July, ICA-AP took the floor to introduce the Pacific Islands Cooperative Network (PICON), a new mechanism for strengthening cooperation and connectivity among cooperative stakeholders across the Pacific Islands. Presenting a Ms. Monalisa Kashyap, ICA-AP’s Programme Coordinator & Advocacy Officer, used the global platform to show how a regional idea has turned into a structured initiative.

PICON began taking shape in January 2026, when the Pacific Regional Dialogue on “Cooperatives as Drivers of the Blue-Green Economy in the Pacific,” hosted by Fiji’s Ministry of Commerce and Business Development and convened by ICA-AP with the Department of Cooperative Business, brought together government representatives and cooperative leaders from Fiji, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands. That conversation gave the region what it had been circling for a while, consensus that Pacific cooperatives needed a unified regional mechanism, not just shared priorities. The Directors of Cooperatives Departments from all four countries renewed their commitment to the idea on the spot and formed a Steering Committee to oversee PICON’s establishment, the first concrete step toward institutionalizing cooperative collaboration across the Pacific and Oceania.

The Members’ Chat gave that regional work a global stage, sitting alongside updates on the ICA Africa Women Entrepreneurship Programme, the ICA Youth Committee’s push for meaningful youth participation, and the ICA-EU Partnership through #Coops4Dev, all under ICA’s broader “People” pillar. Through PICON and the Asia-Pacific Cooperative Youth Summit (APCYS 5.0) alike, ICA-AP is building out the same idea from two directions, giving Pacific and Asia-Pacific cooperative communities, especially young people, a real hand in shaping where the movement goes next.