SANTIAGO, Chile, May 13, CMC – The executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), José Manuel Salazar-Xirinach, has sought to underscore the importance of cooperatives in the productive transformation of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC).
Salazar-Xirinach addressed a two day conference which seeks to increase public awareness of cooperatives’ contribution to sustainable and inclusive productive development, strengthening exchange and collaboration between cooperatives, the governments of the region, and the United Nations.
“Because they generate growth and employment, because they foster collaboration in pursuing solutions to problems, and because they have roots in communities, cooperatives are called on to play an even more leading role in the productive transformation of our economies,”Salazar-Xirinach told the regional gathering, organized in the framework of the International Year of Cooperatives 2025
He told the conference, which ends later on Tuesday, that cooperatives also play a significant role in the “collective efforts to escape the traps of low capacity for growth and transformation; of high inequality and low social mobility; and of low institutional capacity”.
He told the “International Year of Cooperatives 2025;Cooperatives build a better future by promoting productivity, inclusion and territorial development” that cooperatives are strategic allies of productive development.
He said this is because they promote collective efforts to identify and solve problems such as access to work, to housing, to credit, to production, to education, to health and to energy.
“In that regard, we see major similarities and complementarities between the cooperative model and cluster initiatives and other initiatives of productive articulation,” Salazar-Xirinachs said.
The conference is ending on Tuesday with three workshops at the headquarters of ECLAC, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
The workshops are intended to develop policies and tools for the development of t.
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