This material was developed by the International Labor Organization (ILO) in order to assist and advise worker’s cooperatives in gathering, handling, organizing, and monitoring their institutional well-being and performance or basics of managing cooperatives involved in manufacturing and production. This training manual is specifically published to help instructors design an effective, suitable training program to enable elected or potential coop leaders and supervisors in defining the foundations of their cooperative. With 13 main sessions to facilitate, this material aims to establish the nature of a worker's cooperative, its challenges and issues in terms of formation, and some of the bad practices commonly observed by failing coop groups. It also contains some pointers on how to gather perspective from member-workers on how they want the cooperative to be. Likewise, it also guides the cooperatives in knowing what the best operational and financial decisions and systems are applicable for them. These decisions and systems include the need for making effective use of their marketing and selling scheme, pricing, appropriate acquisition of equipment and materials, and financial management and reporting.

With these prior knowledge on working systems for coops, the manual also seeks to provide ways on how to monitor the effectiveness and efficiency of the finances and operations, how to create a method of decision- making for executives,and identifying the reasons for success and failure of achieving cooperative goals. In turn, this will help the worker's cooperative to formulate future strategies, plans, and budget in order to remedy the issues that happened within the organization. Every session in this manual has session objectives, supplementary materials, and recommended activities which can be used by the instructor according to the needs and capabilities of the participants.