Why this session matters to us
This was, on its face, a celebration. It sat inside the commemoration of the International Day of Cooperatives, two days after the observance itself, and it launched a set of seventeen policy briefs titled Building a Better World Together. But underneath the launch was a measurement problem that is squarely ours. Cooperatives are not a marginal sector. On the ILO's own numbers, more than a billion people are cooperative members and cooperative employment reaches one in ten workers worldwide. And yet, as speaker after speaker conceded, that contribution is largely invisible to the machinery the UN uses to score the 2030 Agenda.
So the interesting thing about this hour was not the case for cooperatives. It was watching a global movement build its own evidence base, brief by brief and map by map, precisely because the official one does not count it. That is a data-gap story, and it has a UN fix that already exists on paper and has not reached the reviews where it would matter.
The count the reviews do not keep
The clearest statement of the problem came from the International Cooperative Alliance's policy director, presenting the briefs. His diagnosis was not that cooperatives lack impact. It was that the impact goes unrecorded where recording changes outcomes.
The briefs themselves are best understood as a workaround. Njuguna was candid that the exercise was never meant to prove the obvious.
His actual ask to member states was a data ask, and it is worth reading twice because it is the whole session in a sentence: to “strengthen statistical systems so cooperatives' contribution become visible and measurable and scalable.” The plea to be written into the next round of voluntary national reviews ran through nearly every intervention. Mongolia's Deputy Permanent Representative urged integrating cooperatives “systematically into national development strategies and voluntary national reviews.” Sierra Leone's, a co-facilitator of this year's HLPF Ministerial Declaration, asked that reviews and financing frameworks “fully recognize and engage cooperative societies.” The through-line is unmistakable: the sector believes it is losing standing not because it under-delivers, but because it is under-counted.
The measuring stick the UN already built
Here is the part that makes this more than a lobbying exercise, and it is the part nobody on the panel named out loud. The UN has already solved the technical half of this problem. In 2018 the 20th International Conference of Labour Statisticians adopted the Guidelines concerning Statistics of Cooperatives, the first international statistical standard for measuring the sector: agreed definitions, a typology of cooperative forms, and rules for counting members, workers and economic contribution in a way that is comparable across countries. The work was driven by the same institutions in the room, through COPAC's technical working group on cooperative statistics. The ILO has since published an implementation guide, Measuring Cooperatives.
So the standard exists. What does not exist, in most countries, is its adoption into the national statistical systems that feed voluntary national reviews. That is the real gap this session kept circling without naming: not the absence of a way to count cooperatives, but the distance between an agreed international method and a line in a country's own SDG reporting. A measuring stick that no statistics office picks up counts nothing.
What the numbers look like when someone bothers to collect them
The rest of the session was, in effect, a demonstration of what shows up once cooperatives are counted, and the answer is that the numbers are large and stubbornly local. The seventeen briefs gather case evidence against each Goal, including the five under in-depth review at this Forum. On clean water, the SDG 6 brief cites a Bolivian water cooperative supplying nearly two million people; on energy, community-owned cooperatives extending renewable supply in France and Costa Rica. Figures like these are the movement's own, not independently audited, but they are the kind of granular evidence national reviews rarely carry.
The sharpest illustration came from the United States. National Co-op Grocers reported that about a quarter of its food co-ops' sales come from local products, against roughly two percent at an average grocer, and that a typical member co-op works with 187 local suppliers against 41 at a conventional store. At national scale, the speaker noted that almost half of all Americans belong to a cooperative of some kind and that the top 100 US cooperatives report more than 324 billion dollars in annual sales. These are self-reported sector figures, but they make the point that the sector is only “marginal” where nobody measures it.
Fairtrade International, which works with nearly two million smallholder farmers and workers, most of them organised into cooperatives, described the same instinct to make dispersed local activity legible. And a video message from the chair of the ICA's International Cooperative Development Platform put the measurement point most plainly of anyone. The platform is an interactive global map pulling project data from more than thirty cooperative development organisations, built, she said, because the work has to be made “visible, measurable, and accessible.” It is the same impulse as the briefs: if the official statistics will not hold your contribution, build the ledger yourself.
The honest note from the floor
Two floor interventions kept the session from becoming a pure advocacy set-piece. A youth representative reframed the whole implementation debate, and did it in language that applies as much to data as to funding.
And a civil society representative from Nepal raised the caveat that a room full of cooperative advocates might otherwise have skipped: the sector's own recent cooperative-savings scandals, in which poorer members, many of them women, lost deposits that flowed to well-connected insiders. It was a useful reminder that counting cooperatives well means counting the failures too, not only the case studies chosen for a brief. Chile's delegate, for her part, pointed the discussion outward to the General Assembly resolution on the social and solidarity economy, which Chile co-sponsors with Senegal and Spain and which is due to be revisited in the coming session, the broader frame in which the cooperative data gap sits.
Our read
Strip away the anniversary and this was a sector asking, with unusual specificity, to be counted. Not praised, counted. The tell is that the movement has stopped waiting for national statistics to do it and is compiling its own: seventeen briefs, a global project map, a US impact survey. That is resourceful, and it is also a symptom. The UN already produced the fix in 2018, an agreed international standard for cooperative statistics, and it has not travelled the short distance from a Geneva conference of labour statisticians into the voluntary national reviews presented a few floors up at this very Forum. Until it does, cooperatives will keep being told they are strategic partners in the speeches and left out of the scorecard, and a tenth of the world's workforce will keep proving its worth in anecdotes because the ledger has no column for it.
Why it matters for the SDGs
The cooperative economy touches most of the Goals, but the measurement question lands hardest on SDG 17 (the means of implementation, follow-up and review, where voluntary national reviews and data systems live) and SDG 8 (decent work, where a sector employing one in ten workers should be impossible to overlook). It also runs straight through the five goals under review this year: cooperatives are front-line providers on SDG 6 (water), SDG 7 (energy), SDG 9 and SDG 11 (inclusive industry and housing). If the ILO statistics guidelines were actually implemented, member states would be reporting cooperative contributions against each of these as a matter of course. They mostly are not, which is why the sector's real contribution to the 2030 Agenda remains an estimate rather than a measurement.
Watch & read
- Session page (ICA / COPAC), and the UN Web TV recording.
- Building a Better World Together, the seventeen SDG policy briefs from COPAC and the International Cooperative Alliance (English, French, Spanish).
- Guidelines concerning Statistics of Cooperatives (20th ICLS, 2018), the first international statistical standard, and the ILO's Measuring Cooperatives implementation guide.
- ILO Director-General's International Day of Cooperatives message (4 July 2026), the source of the billion-members and one-in-ten-workers figures.
- The 2026 voluntary national reviews, where cooperative contributions would show up if they were counted · Full HLPF 2026 coverage.
Quotations are lightly edited from an automated (Otter.ai) transcript of the UN Web TV recording and should be read as close paraphrase. The ICA President's video message was delivered in Spanish and is summarised, not quoted. Figures are as the speakers and the policy briefs reported them and were not independently verified.