2018 has been a year of many cooperative celebrations.
While the ICA had the pleasure to take part in the 200-anniversary ceremony of the French cooperative bank Caisses d’Epargne earlier in the year, in October the President Ariel Guarco joined the Jubilee event of International Raiffeisen Union (IRU) in Koblenz, Germany. Guarco presented a panorama of the cooperative movement as a global driving force and visited the Raiffeisen house. This event also saw the election of Nandini Azad, president of the Indian Cooperative Network for Women to become the first Indian woman to be elected to the board of the International Raiffeisen Union.
IRU is a worldwide voluntary association of national cooperative organisations having 52 members in 33 countries, including France, the Netherlands, South Africa, Austria, and India.
In September, ICA Director-General Bruno Roelants was invited to the 25-anniversary conference of Coopfond, a cooperative fund under Legacoop, one of the three Italian cooperative organisations. “The role of Coopfond is crucial. It has managed to reinvest the 3% of the surpluses of the cooperatives affiliated to Legacoop in substantial projects that are creating new jobs”, has said Roelants.
On 14 November, Guarco was invited to be the keynote speaker at the celebration of 56 years of the Cooperativa Rural de Electrificación's (Rural Electrification Cooperative) institutional life and to the International forum on new thinking and cooperative leadership, for the development of the popular and solidarity-based economy organised by the Cooperativa de Ahorro y Crédito Riobamba on its fortieth anniversary.
Also in 2018, Euricse celebrates its 10th anniversary with a new book “Rediscovering cooperatives”, a decade of studies in ten chapters, released to celebrate the milestone. Ten years have passed since the birth of Euricse, the ICA’s partner in producing the World Cooperative Monitor.
