This is part of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Cooperatives and the World of Work series. It has been produced in partnership with the Gender, Equality and Diversity (GED) Branch at the ILO.
A recent report (covering 74 countries and around three-quarter of the world’s population) estimates that worldwide more than 26 million people work in cooperative enterprises as employees or worker-members. Among these people there are also women and men with disabilities.
Some cooperatives publish information on the percentage of their workers who have disabilities and the steps being taken to ensure their inclusion in the workplace. However, collecting disability-disaggregated data is not a universal practice, and the international cooperative movement may wish to further encourage this good practice. Thus, consolidated data on the numbers of people with disabilities working for cooperatives are not currently available.