Title: Global Study on Youth Cooperatives entrepreneurship - with a focus on workers, social and independent producers' / workers' cooperatives

Publisher: CICOPA

Year: 2018

Summary (* excerpt from the report attached)

The new study shows that In a changing world of work, cooperatives provide security and meaningful jobs to young people.

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CICOPA, the international organization of industrial and service cooperatives, has recently published a study on the status, potential and role of youth cooperatives as a solution to the serious youth unemployment problem.

This study outlines the current state of youth unemployment in the world and explains the experiences and insights of the cooperatives of young generations, and what is needed to create a supportive environment for such youth cooperatives.

Todays, youth is suffering from a serious unemployment problem which is engendered by (rapid) demographic changes, globalization and technological innovation. All the factors make young people disproportionately affected by informal work and deteriorating working conditions. Simultaneously, new forms of work such as independent workers and crowd work are increasing these days in the innovation and technology service sectors.

In this situation, cooperatives help them not only to satisfy their search for meaningful work, experience and values-related aspirations but also their concrete needs for stable jobs, career opportunities and protection.

These cooperatives are considered a positive economic performance in production and sales and increasing or stable trends in the number of jobs created in a recent year. The significance of cooperative employment cannot be ignored today: they provide employment to 9.46% of the world’s employed population. Also, they are evaluated as good models which have a high resilient in the face of crises and economic downturns. Most of them are micro or small-sized enterprises, which may be explained by their generally recent creation and high concentration in non-capital-intensive service activities. It seems they are leading the certain business site by implementing the new organizational methods in their business practices.

Cooperatives can play a crucial role in responding to new challenges introduced by recent societal and economic changes affecting new generations. However, they warn that cooperatives cannot be considered to be a panacea.

The report proposes to create the environment which is providing the institutional frameworks regulating the legal status of young workers in cooperatives, access to financial resources, user-friendly bureaucracy and concrete supporting measures to help youth to start up and run businesses for them to maximize the potential of cooperatives. Last but not least, they are highlighting the cooperatives movement for integration and participation of youth to in it.