Project to support women cooperatives starts in pilot provinces

ANKARA

A project to support and improve women cooperatives in Turkey, conducted by three ministries and funded by the European Union, has started in 24 out of the country’s entire 81 provinces, daily Milliyet reported.

“The Improvement of Women Cooperatives” project, coordinated by the Family and Social Policies Ministry, Forestry and Agriculture Ministry and the Trade Ministry, aims to help women cooperatives, established for or by especially the victims of domestic violence.

The EU has provided some 3.3 million euros to the project.

“We formed a women’s cooperative in [the southern province of] Mersin with Turkish and migrant women. We are producing food products,” Mehmet Sarıca, the head of Inogar Innovation Cooperative, told the daily on Nov. 29.

Sarıca advised that the municipalities should be encouraged to buy the products of these women’s cooperatives.

The Terra Development Cooperative is an institution that applied for the project. “We focused working on migration, development, fight against poverty, and social policies,” said Çağıl Öngen Köse, the head of the cooperative.

“We also conducted projects for women living in shelters with their children,” she said.

Gülsüm Soyak is the head of a cooperative established to help women with disabled children. “We have an atelier where women learn needlecraft while their disabled children make ceramics under the guidance of special teachers,” she said.

The cooperative aims to enable the mother and the child socialize with the public, while the women earn their money by selling the clothes they produce.

The institution opened a drying center in the Finike district of the southern province of Antalya where women make flour out of spinach and beet. “The women’s cooperatives should be given the chance to sell their products to public institutions,” she added.