2024 World Social Report.
Released on October 17th under the title “Social Development in Times of Converging Crises: A Call for Global Action”, the report is the output of the global call by the GA resolution 77/281 in April 2023 to promote the social and solidarity economy for sustainable development.
Overall, the report estimates that the economic cost of crisis mitigation from 2020 until 2030 will translate into “a cumulative output loss of over $50 trillion”, to the detriment of social development. It is a global plea to prioritise people and the planet over profit, and for public-private social investments to be at the same level as their economic counterparts.
Concerning the social and solidarity economy, it specifically praises cooperatives’ self-organisation capacity and resilience as a necessary and inclusive countermeasure to the current economic power imbalances, which affect the social rights of the most vulnerable.
Among its national and international recommendations, the report calls for capacity-building development programs, a social-printed fiscal space, and a rework of national policies and strategies for social development to ensure the resilience of all stakeholders who benefit from and contribute to the global social ecosystem.
2025 will be a game-changing year for paving a new global pathway for social development, offering two historical momentums to highlight the key contribution of the Social and Solidarity Economy to the UN Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals.
First, the UN will be holding the Second World Summit for Social Development in November 2025 in Qatar. 20 years after the First World Social Summit in 1995 which ended with the Copenhagen Declaration on Social Development and Programme of Action, the Summit will be the moment to renew and contextualise the commitments made under the so-called Copenhagen Consensus and reflect on the post-2030 world.
Second, it has been declared by the UN as the International Year of Cooperatives (IYC25), the second time in history since 2012. The IYC25 will be an opportunity to influence the discussions of the Second World Social Summit. Cooperatives Europe and its members will play their part in raising awareness of the key role of cooperatives as promoters of an alternative people-centred and resilient business model that leaves no one behind, including amidst the multi-level crises that the international community is facing. Under the ICA-EU Partnership, these efforts will be upscaled at the global level to implement knowledge-sharing and capacity-building actions on international cooperative development and stress the global multiplier effect of cooperatives in international cooperation.