A multi-stakeholder working group on co-operative statistics has been set up in Turkey. The working group will be co-ordinated by the co-operatives directorate on the Ministry of Customs and Trade and technically supported by TurkStat.
With this move, Turkey has become the first pilot country to follow up on the Resolution on statistics on co-operatives that was adopted at the 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians.
The resolution recognised the need to produce statistics on co-operatives in all countries of the world. It also recommended that interested national statistical offices carries out further development work on the measurement of co-operatives, doing pilot studies and preparing progress reports for discussion at the 20th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS).
Paragraph eight of the International Labour Organizaion's (ILO) recommendation 193 on the promotion of co-operatives also encourages governments to ensure that national policies “seek to improve national statistics on cooperatives with a view to the formulation and implementation of development policies”.
The Turkish co-operative movement welcomed the creation of the co-operative statistics group, which came out of a Co-operative Statistics roundtable taking place in Ankara on 3 February.
According to Huseyin Polat of the National Co-operative Union of Turkey (NCUT), the movement will play an active role in the working group and provide support to the working group.
ILO’s Turkey office along with ILO Statistics and ILO COOP will offer further technical support to the working group on a needs basis and through progress meetings that would take place every six months.
Speaking at the roundtable, president of NCUT, Muammar Niksarlı, said that Turkish co-operatives were unable to show their strength at international level due to the lack of statistics. While administrative data exists at local level, this is not aggregated, processed and analysed properly, he added.
Mustafa Sepetçi, Head of the International Relations Department of the Cooperatives General Directorate in the Ministry of Customs and Trade also highlighted that co-operative statistics was one of the key areas of action identified under the Turkish National Co-operative Strategy and Action Plan of 2012-16. He confirmed that his ministry, which under this strategy and action plan has a co-ordinating mandate, had already started developing a registration database of all co-operatives in the country that can be used toward establishing an administrative reference for co-operative statistics.
Another speaker at the roundtable, Mr Hakki Ozel from ILO Statistics Department explained how the ICLS met every five years to devise international standards, recommendations, resolutions and guidelines in advancing statistics on a range of issues.
The first meeting of the working group is due to take place before the end of February. The progress of the working group will be presented in a workshop in Geneva in late 2015 along with other pilot countries and the results achieved would be further elaborated upon at the 20th ICLS in 2018.
Discussions are underway with cooperative movements, relevant government ministries and national statistics offices of other countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Simel Esim, head of the Cooperatives Unit at the ILO says "We are looking forward to other countries joining this important and needed initiative".
Photo: Members of the Turkish co-operative movement, staff from related ministries and ILO at the meeting in Ankara
