The International Cooperative Alliance – Asia and Pacific (ICA-AP), through its Committee on Women, is set to launch a new regional study in April, 2026, aimed at strengthening the evidence base on women’s participation and leadership in cooperatives across the region.
Titled “Engendering Cooperative Data in the Asia-Pacific Region: Membership, Leadership and Institutional Enablers, “ the study comes at a critical time. While women form a significant part of cooperative membership across Asia and the Pacific, their presence in leadership and decision-making roles remains uneven-and often underreported. The primary purpose of the 2026 Gender Disaggregated Data Study is to update and strengthen the existing regional database on women’s participation in cooperatives in the Asia Pacific region.
A key challenge the study seeks to address is the lack of reliable, comparable gender-disaggregated data. In many countries, such data is either not systematically collected or varies in definition and scope, making it difficult for cooperatives and policymakers to assess progress or design targeted interventions.
This 2026 study builds on earlier regional efforts conducted in 2005 ‘The Study on Engendering Database in Co-operatives in Asia-Pacific’ and 2015–16 ‘Gender is More than a Statistic’, which established an important baseline on women’s participation in cooperatives. A decade later, the new study aims not only to update this data but also to go a step further-by examining how women move from membership to leadership, and what institutional factors enable or hinder this progression. It will explore how rules, policies, and organisational practices influence women’s access to leadership roles, their continuity in these roles, and their ability to re-enter leadership positions after career or life interruptions.
The study will cover approximately 25 to 30 countries across the ICA-AP region, using a two-tier approach. Data will be collected through apex cooperative organisations at the national level, as well as directly from primary cooperatives to capture ground-level realities. An additional qualitative component will document personal leadership journeys of women in cooperatives, offering deeper insights into lived experiences behind the data.
The findings are expected to generate a comprehensive regional dataset, enable comparisons over time, and identify gaps in current systems. More importantly, the study aims to provide actionable recommendations to strengthen women’s leadership and support cooperatives in building more inclusive governance structures.
The study commissioned under the ICA-AP Gender Project, with support from the Japanese Consumers’ Co-operative Union (JCCU), Japan, and the ICA-EU FFPA 2 will run from April to October 2026, with the final findings to be presented at the Fourth Regional Conference on the Status of Women in Cooperatives in Asia-Pacific, scheduled to take place in Tagaytay, Philippines, in December 2026.
-ICA AP
