The International Day of Cooperatives: an occasion to highlight FAO’s support to the GDC at the Ministry of Agriculture
The International Day of Cooperatives
An occasion to highlight FAO’s support to the General Directorate of Cooperatives at the Ministry of Agriculture
Each year, on the first Saturday of July, cooperatives around the world celebrate “The International Day of Cooperatives” to increase awareness and highlight their role in bringing equality, social stability, international solidarity and more stability into the world. This year, on Saturday, 2 July 2022, cooperatives worldwide will celebrate this #CoopsDay under the theme “Cooperatives Build a Better World”.
By generating more jobs, contributing to food security, and confronting climate change, Cooperatives have proven to be highly efficient in many different sectors with tangible economic and social impacts on livelihoods, and consequently contributing to building a better, more prosperous and peaceful world.
In Lebanon, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is celebrating this day by highlighting its support to the General Directorate of Cooperatives (GDC) at the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) in the framework of the Canada-funded FAO project “Support to Women's Cooperatives and Associations in the agri-food sector in Lebanon”.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)’s technical and institutional support to the General Directorate of Cooperatives (GDC):
For the past couple of years, FAO in Lebanon has been working closely with the General Directorate of Cooperatives to strengthen its capacities through trainings, based on an analysis of the agency’s existing challenges and needs. As a result of this support, the GDC is now better able to monitor cooperatives.
“Our work at the General Directorate of Cooperatives has always been solely based on paperwork. It is therefore possible to imagine the amount of paper and files that we have to deal with and how time consuming this is. With FAO’s ‘Support to Women’s cooperatives and associations in the agri-food sector of Lebanon’ project, automation and digitalization have been introduced so that all the data can be accessed automatically, thus allowing better time management and ensuring transparency in dealing with the documents,” said Gloria Abouzeid, Director-General of Cooperatives at the Ministry of Agriculture. She then emphasized on the fact that “in this current crisis, we cannot but stress the importance of teamwork and cooperation as key leverages to building sustainable and effective cooperatives.”
The new database that FAO has been implementing with GDC contains essential information on cooperatives in Lebanon, including financial information, funded projects, and members’ database, which allows less paperwork and more efficiency in handling these types of documents.
From her side, FAO Representative in Lebanon, Mrs. Nora Ourabah Haddad, said that “cooperatives are economic and social institutions managed by their members. They place the interests of their members before profitability. They have multiple benefits, including access to markets, natural resources, reducing costs, providing social protection, as well as allowing their members to express their opinions and have an influence in their societies”.
FAO’s Representative continued “in light of the circumstances and the crisis that Lebanon is going through, and with the help of FAO’s project ‘Support to Women’s cooperatives and associations in the agri-food sector of Lebanon’ – which focuses on 150 women entrepreneurs groups and enhances their capacity in several areas including financial resources, business management and other services – cooperatives are now returning to their essential role in improving the country's prosperity and offering solutions for male and female farmers to overcome the obstacles they face.”
To know more about these activities, please check this short movie.
About the project "Support to Women’s cooperatives and associations in the agri-food sector of Lebanon":
The project, funded by the Government of Canada, and implemented in cooperation with the Ministry of Agriculture and the General Directorate of Cooperatives, aims to empower rural women in Lebanon and improve their livelihoods through capacity building, grants and cash for work.
Since its launch in 2019, the project has contributed to building the capacities of 32 facilitators and 255 women groups (cooperatives, associations and informal groups) by enrolling them in cooperative business schools, where they followed specialized, complementary and gender curricula. They were trained by specialized experts and by the facilitators who followed up and helped them develop their business plan in a feasible and sustainable manner. One hundred and fifty women's groups are being selected to receive cash or in-kind grants.
The grants will enable them to obtain equipment and production inputs to move forward in the production and marketing, with the aim to create sustainable income-generating small scale projects, to generate job opportunities, and to improve the economic and social conditions of women, their families and communities.