It is open to all interested people having a stake in the organic and fair-trade cotton area. There is no fee to participate. The overall area of interest is 'organic and fair-trade cotton.' Within this thematic area topics to be discussed are defined by participants themselves, based on their needs and interests.
Members of the Global Organic Cotton Community Space can profit from the platform in the following ways:
- quick responses to questions on hot issues
- saving time gathering information
- staying up to date with the latest news
- being part of a constantly evolving network of people working in the same field of interest
- participating in shaping strategies in the global organic cotton sector
- key learnings and summaries of discussions held in topic-specific online dialogues
- Online dialogues on organic cotton
Background
In recent years Helvetas (the Swiss Association for International Cooperation), ICCO (Dutch Interchurch Organisation for Development Co-operation) and Organic Exchange intensified their collaboration in the area of organic and fair-trade cotton, in order to use synergies and work more efficiently by exchanging information and by learning from each others’ experiences.
They felt the need to have additional tools and processes to exchange views, opinions and experiences on their work, both among themselves and with other people working in the organic cotton sector. So they decided to establish and run a web platform to exchange knowledge and information on organic and fair-trade cotton complementing face to face meetings.
In 2008 Helvetas, ICCO and SECO (Swiss state secretariat for economic affairs) assured co-funding to bring the Global Organic Cotton Community Space into being. The web platform went live in June 2009 and is managed by the Organic & Fairtrade Competence Centre of Helvetas and by Organic Exchange.
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