Coopermondo and Colombia’s Ministry of Labour sign agreement to promote twinning arrangements between cooperatives

In Bogotà Coopermondo – Confcooperative’s Vice President, Claudia Fiaschi, signed a declaration of intent to foster international cooperation in Colombia. The document was signed together with Gil Hernando Alfonso Prada, the Director General of the National Service of Learning (SENA), agency managed by the Ministry of Labour of Colombia, on which Board of Directors sit the President of the Republic and several ministers of the government of the Latin American country.

 

 “The aim,” the document states, “is to strengthen entrepreneurial and cultural ties between the Italian cooperative movement and the Republic of Colombia, to emphasize the common goal of creating new and better opportunities for decent work (socially inclusive and economically effective) starting from professional exchanges and twinning arrangements between cooperatives of the two countries”.

“We commit ourselves to cooperate and develop international cooperation projects in this country, promoting exchanges of experiences and knowledge and providing training to managers in the cooperative sector,” said the Vice-President Fiaschi.

 

 “For us it is not only an honor to collaborate with the Italian cooperative movement, but also an enormous opportunity of learning and growth“, believes the director of SENA Prada Gil. “The Italian one is a model from which we can learn a lot and to which we think we can offer examples of good practices of solidarity economy“.

 

 In the coming days the Vice President Fiaschi, accompanied by the Director of Coopermondo, Danilo Salerno, Chiara Piva of the Italian Federation of Cooperative Banks (Federcasse BCC) and Mauro Camicia of the Italian-Latin America Institute (IILA), will fly to the Cauca region where the second mission of the project “Agricoop – Colombia“, which began in January 2015, will start. The training module of this mission is dedicated to the topic of cooperative finance for sustainable and rural development.

  

  Thursday, July 30th a tri-national event is organised in Popayan (Cauca) and it will be attended by experts of cooperative finance, solidarity economy and international development cooperation coming from Italy, Colombia and Ecuador. Among the guests there will be also Bepi Tonello, President of BanCodesarrollo, the bank credit cooperative Ecuadorian born to pulse Federcasse and now coordinates the project “Microfinance Campesina”.