As part of the International Year of Cooperatives 2025 (IYC2025), the ILO Cooperative, Social and Solidarity Economy Unit (COOP/SSE) organized a global webinar on November 20, 2025, on the role of the social and solidarity economy in crisis response. Drawing on experiences from Jordan, the Philippines, Viet Nam and Kenya, the discussion focused on how SSE organizations can become central pillars of national resilience systems.
An ILO mandate for resilience: positioning the SSE as a driver of crisis response
Decent work is a precondition for peace, resilience and social cohesion, especially in fragile and crisis-affected contexts. This principle is embedded in the ILO's founding mandate in the Treaty of Versailles and reaffirmed in Recommendation No. 205, which provides a global framework for promoting decent work in crisis situations while explicitly recognizing cooperatives and SSE entities as key contributors to recovery and resilience. Recommendation No. 204 on the transition from the informal to the formal economy and the 2022 Resolution concerning decent work and the SSE further strengthen the normative basis for action.
To translate this mandate into impact at scale, countries must address several enabling conditions. First, legal and policy frameworks should formally embed SSE entities within national crisis-response and development strategies. Second, support structures and financing mechanisms must be strengthened, including cooperative development services, blended finance, liquidity facilities and financial products tailored to crisis settings. Third, institutional recognition as cooperatives and SSE organizations should be positioned as long-term partners in humanitarian response and recovery, not as peripheral actors.
Translating policy into practice: country solutions to scale
Country examples show how cooperatives and SSE entities operate across the crisis cycle and offers models ready for replication and scaling:
- In Jordan, the Jordan Cooperative Corporation (JCC) highlights how agricultural cooperatives sustained livelihoods in a protracted refugee crisis. Through employment services, flexible work permits, training on governance and business, cooperatives support both Jordanian workers and Syrian refugees, with specific initiatives with women in rural areas and refugee settlements.
- In the Philippines, CLIMBS Life and General Insurance Cooperative provides a model for climate insurance that enables farmers to receive rapid payouts aftershocks and restart production quickly. National scale-up will depend on coordinated public-private financing and regulatory alignment with climate-risk management system
- In Kenya, the Co-operative Bank of Kenya showed how cooperative banking can protect local economies during systemic shocks. Its COVID-19 response, maintaining credit flows, safeguarding jobs and supporting emergency relief, underscored the importance of expanding digital financial inclusion, improving digital literacy and ensuring cooperative liquidity support. These elements can be advanced through regulatory reforms and strengthened government-cooperative collaboration.
In Viet Nam, cooperative-led cash-for-work programmes led by the Viet Nam Cooperative Alliance provided immediate income to households affected by typhoons while repairing essential infrastructure. Extensive cooperative networks enable rapid outreach, but scaling requires predictable funding, stronger rapid assessments and gender-responsive approaches, especially in ethnic minority communities.
© ILO
Speakers of the webinar Key messages and forward-looking actions
Several priorities emerge for governments, social partners and SSE representatives seeking to leverage the full potential of the SSE:
- Build on existing cooperative and SSE infrastructure as a core component of national preparedness and resilience systems.
- Institutionalize the SSE's role across the entire crisis cycle, from prevention and preparedness to response, recovery and reconstruction.
- Scale promising innovations, such as climate insurance in the Philippines and cash-for-work mechanisms in Viet Nam. through supportive regulation, financing and long-term partnerships.
- Centre inclusion and gender equality, ensuring SSE-led responses reach women, refugees, informal workers and marginalized communities.
- Rebuild and renew the social contract, using crisis responses to strengthen community trust and position cooperatives and SSE entities as democratic, locally rooted institutions capable of sustaining resilience over time.
- Strengthen public-private partnerships and cooperative-government collaboration to sustain these models
These key messages reaffirm a simple idea: when recognised, resourced and included in planning - in both crisis and non-crisis times -SSE entities are indispensable allies in building more resilient, inclusive and peaceful societies.
