Bookings are now live for the International Co-operative Alliance's Cape Town conference.
Delegates can book online through the special event website at www.capetown2013.coop to attend the General Assembly and Global Conference.
During the week of 1-5 November, two thousand people are expected to attend the event in Cape Town, South Africa. This will be the first time in International Co-operative Alliance’s 118 year history that it will be held on the continent.
The programme will start with statutory meetings of ICA bodies and then move into the main conference. The theme of the conference is "A Co-operative Decade in Action" and will focus on the Blueprint for a Co-operative Decade, which aims to take co-operatives to a position of being the preferred model and as a result the fastest-growing form of enterprise by 2020.
Details have been released about fIve thematic workshops that will run concurrently over two days of the conference. The workshops will deal with key issues related to the Blueprint under the areas of food security; access to community services; communication; the new economic age; and building knowledge.
The ‘Food Security and Sustainable Supply Chains’ workshops will deal with the role of agriculture and fisheries co-operatives in providing food supply; challenges in the food supply chain; the role of retail and consumer co-operatives in ensuring distribution of food; co-operative to co-operative trading; and the role of micro-credit and co-operative banks in developing countries / rural development
A series of workshops under the ‘Access to Community Services’ will look at building and empowering communities and two sessions will deal with establishing a framework for the co-operative decade under themes of the Blueprint.
The Power of Communication sessions will discover the Power of Branding; Participation in the media revolution; Uniting the world through the power of a story; Communication theory into practice and an Integrated Internet Identity.
The resilience of co-operatives to the economic crisis will be explored in a key number of sessions entitled ‘At the Forefront of the New Economic Age’. The workshops will look at how co-operatives have massively continued to operate in the real economy at the local level and in close contact with ordinary people's needs through banking, insurance, housing and development.
‘Building Knowledge’ will also be a key thematic workshop at the event. These sessions will look at co-operative education and training; accountancy standards and the World Co-operative Monitor.
• For more details on the workshops and to book your place, visit: capetown2013.coop — the full programme can also be viewed online.
