The 9th Conference of the Platform Cooperatives Consortium took place from 30 November - 2 December at the Kerala Crafts Village in Thiruvananthapuram, India, featuring over 88 speakers from 15 countries.
Themed Roots of Resilience, the event was organised at the Kerala Crafts Village in Thiruvananthapuram, India, which was built and is managed by the ICA member Uralungal Labour Contract Cooperative Society (ULCCS), one of India's oldest and largest workers' co-operatives, founded 98 years ago.
In one of the presentations, Santosh Kumar of the ICA Global Office, who was selected as one of the ten researchers of the 2023/24 Cohort, proposed creating international platform cooperatives in the Global South to support the sustainability-related reporting needs of MSMEs and cooperatives on terms set by the users. A short video describing the focus of the paper can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVFrQNk7U1Y
The conference was organised in collaboration with IT for Change and received support from the European Commission, Kerala Development and Innovation Strategic Council (K-DISC), and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Partners included ICA member OCB Brazil and ICA Asia and Pacific, with the latter represented by its staff, including Regional Director Balu Iyer.
Photo credit: Kerala Crafts Village
