Skip to content

AWCF Asian Women in Co-operative Development Forum

  • narrow screen resolution
  • wide screen resolution
  • Increase font size
  • Decrease font size
  • Default font size
  • default color
  • black color
  • cyan color
  • green color
  • red color
Home News Archives Gender integration, leadership development in AP co-ops taken up
Gender integration, leadership development in AP co-ops taken up PDF Print E-mail
Friday, 05 October 2007 00:00
naningMs Naning Mardiniah, AWCF Chairperson, and Ms Salome Ganibe, AWCF Executive Director, represented AWCF in the sixth meeting of the International Co-operative Alliance-Asia and Pacific Regional Women’s Committee (ICA AP RWC) held October 16, 2007 at Carlton Hotel, Singapore. They were joined by Ms Norma Pereyras, Secretary of the AWCF Board of Trustees (BOT), who took part in the meeting for the National Confederation of Cooperatives (NATCCO) where she is a Board member representing the women’s sector of the NATCCO network. NATCCO is member of both the ICA and AWCF. The three women were among 50 women from 10 countries who took part in discussing the progress of gender integration programs in nine AP countries, based on reports made by 13 committee members. The reports highlighted the following needs: a) more leadership development programs for women and b) mainstreaming gender in co-ops to increase women's participation in co-ops at all levels especially at the international level. The meeting was followed by a study tour to the National Trade Union Congress (NTUC) Insurance Co-operative that enabled the participants to have a glimpse of the co-operative work in Singapore.

 

On October 17, 2007, AWCF attended the ICA Gender Equality Committee (GEC) conference held at the Raffles Convention Center, themed “Gender Equality: a Driving Force of Economic and Social Innovation in Co-operatives.” In the conference, Ms Ganibe was one of the resource persons as the GEC discussed the relevance of gender equality and equal opportunities for everyone involved in the co-op movement. Given the topic “Gender Equality as a Driving Force for Social and Economic Innovation,” Ms Ganibe expounded on the concept of transformative leadership—or the need for co-ops to identify and exemplify a development-oriented (DO), issue-focused (IF), and gender-sensitive (GS) philosophy—as a tool to effect change in existing structures and practices that are detrimental to the development of co-ops around the world.

The two major activities in Singapore were part of parallel events held to celebrate the ICA General Assembly on October 18-19, 2007 also in Singapore that focused on “Innovation in Co-operative Business” and attended by over 1,000 co-operators from all over the world.

< Prev   Next >