Strengthening Social and Solidarity Economy Knowledge Base

The project is funded by the Ministry of Employment and Labour of the Republic of Korea. The project seeks to generate sound and convincing evidence about the size, outreach and socio-economic importance of the SSE, including cooperatives, through desk and field research and the collection of statistics.

The project is divided into two components:

The first component is on SSE research and capacity building in Asia, where it seeks to generate a comprehensive overview, in both qualitative and quantitative terms, of the SSE landscape in six Asian countries, followed by capacity-building and improved policy-making at the national level. It expands the scope of the first phase by including six additional countries, namely Cambodia, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Thailand and Vietnam.

The second component is on cooperative statistics where it will conduct pilot test in five countries (Republic of Korea, Italy, Tanzania, Turkey, and Cost Rica), identify good practices, develop a core set of statistical variables and elaborate a comprehensive manual on cooperative statistics.

Through this project, the ILO believes that practitioners, policy-makers and other stakeholders concerned with SSE will have access to robust evidence on the unique contribution of the SSE to decent work and sustainable development, enabling them to call for the systematic inclusion of the SSE in national and international development agendas.