The Ibero-American Observatory OIBESCOOP has carried out the project ‘Ellas Transforman’, stories of women who lead the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) in Ibero-America. It is an initiative of OIBESCOOP and NODESS Morelos (Mexico), with the collaboration of CKL Comunicaciones Coop. and its project Wecoop, and the sponsorship of the Ministry of Labour and Social Economy of the Government of Spain.
The work, directed by Inmaculada Carrasco Monteagudo, President of OIBESCOOP and Professor at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, and Cristina Girardo, Professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, documents the trajectories of women from Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Colombia, Costa Rica and Ecuador, as examples of extraordinary women who have succeeded in building alternatives and transforming territories through the social economy.
The project is based on OIBESCOOP’s sustained commitment to making visible the role of women in the SSE. This commitment has materialised in recent years in pioneering collective works that have laid the foundations for understanding the intersection between gender and SSE in the region: “Mujeres, Cooperativismo y Economía Social y Solidaria en Iberoamérica”, by Carmen Marcuello Servós, María del Carmen Barragán Mendoza, Eliane Navarro Rosandiski and Juan Fernando Álvarez Rodríguez (Coords.) 2020; and “Economía Social y Solidaria y Género. Una mirada desde Iberoamérica”, coordinated by Marie J. Bouchard, Carmen Marcuello and Juan F. Álvarez (2021).
Both publications brought together academic contributions from researchers from different countries, articulating theoretical analyses with case studies, which highlighted both the contributions and the persistent challenges for women in this sector. They also made clear the structural barriers that remain: the sexual division of labour, the overload of unpaid care work, segregation in management positions and the urgent need for public policies with a gender perspective to sustain these processes of transformation.
Much more than theory
With the new digital work “Ellas transforman: stories of women who lead the social and solidarity economy”, a qualitative leap is taken in this path of research and visibility. The new project opts for a methodology that is “deeply situated and narrative”. It documents, through biographical profiles and photographic records, the concrete trajectories of women who lead SSE experiences in different territories of Hispanic America.
The aim is to cross the boundary of the conceptual in order to inhabit the everyday, showing how female leadership materialises through the different alternatives offered by the social economy. As Professors Carrasco and Girardo explain, “we are not talking about theory. We are talking about Estela, Mar, Aurelia, Paulina, Andrea, Consoli, Jessica, Tatiana, Carmen, María Eugenia… Women who lead textile co-operatives, family farming associations, community care networks, agroecological enterprises, solidarity finance initiatives…”
And she adds: “Each biographical profile, each photograph in their workplaces, reminds us that the economy can be human, collective and transformative. That female leadership not only generates decent incomes, but also preserves ancestral knowledge, protects the environment and broadens civic participation.”
The stories reveal that women do not participate in the Social and Solidarity Economy solely out of economic necessity, but build spaces of collective power where they develop leadership, resilience and emotional intelligence, becoming agents of change who challenge patriarchal structures.
“Ellas transforman” allows us to learn about the stories of these women and thus to understand the economy from a human and collective perspective, in terms of dignity, equality and the construction of alternatives to the dominant economic model.
Access “Ellas transforman: stories of women who lead the social and solidarity economy”
