Transformation Central

By the time I visited SEWA in January of 2007, this organization was already a legend, talked about in development circles, emulated on the grassroots. I had the opportunity to talk with women working at the administrative level, and also see women in village cooperatives.
SEWA estimates that over 94% of Indian women work in informal sector, with no protection, with harassment from the police, with little opportunity for advancement. SEWA, formed in 1971, aims to organize these women. The leader of the women’s wing of the Textile Labor Association in Ahmedabad, Ela Bhatt, realized that an innovative type of advocacy was required for the many women workers in the textile industry, and, at the suggestion of the women workers themselves, a new type of trade union was born. SEWA’s members now include home-based workers, hawkers and vendors, manual laborers and service providers, and producers. As of 2006, there were almost one million members throughout India, with almost half of those in Gujarat state. Although registered as a trade union, SEWA has been continually expanding its services to fit the needs of poor women. In 1974, SEWA started a bank to provide credit and a vehicle for saving, and they have recently created their own custom insurance products to help their members achieve income security. There is also SEWA academy, where members can learn valuable skills, especially literacy. SEWA’s goal is total empowerment of its members, but they realize that most of their members’ most immediate concerns are economic. In this vein, most of SEWA’s programs pursue total empowerment through economic empowerment, which encompasses poverty eradication, equal access to economic opportunities, equal sharing of total work and income, equal access to infrastructure facilities and financial services, and equality of empowerment.

Empowerment is the end, and cooperatives have become an increasingly used means. SEWA is providing health-care to some of its members by supporting the formation of women-run rural health-care cooperatives, and they are also fostering child-care cooperatives, both an income-generating enterprise for the cooperative members and a much needed service for SEWA sisters. Mostly, SEWA incubates rural producer cooperatives, but only after performing an extensive base-line socio-economic survey to determine the needs and skills of a given community.  To date, SEWA has started 84 cooperatives and 181 rural producer groups. They help the new enterprises register with the government, draft an organizing document, hold elections for an executive committee, and form a business plan. SEWA also provides training for executive board members. And once the cooperative begins to produce, the entire SEWA membership helps to sustain it by practicing solidarity in consumption.

Over time, SEWA has been continually growing, improving the lives of new members, and discovering new ways to expand their services, their advocacy, and their program of empowerment. SEWA now organizes on a national level, and new SEWA movements have begun in Turkey, Yemen, and South Africa. But this growth can offer new challenges. When I visited the organization, for instance, I was shown around by tour guides who were trained to project a certain organizational story, and whose presence was an indication of the increasing organizational resources that must be directed to accommodating and channeling the international attention and acclaim that SEWA has received. In another instances, the technocratic staff spoke of partnerships with large for-profit companies in India, more excited about the new resources they could offer their members than worried about potential influence that these corporations could have on SEWA’s mission and goals. SEWA’s innovative model and devotion to its members rightly attracts attention and partnerships, but its most important connections are to its many members.

For more information, visit SEWA’s website: http://www.sewa.org/; or go to an in-depth description of the organization at the United Nation’s Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s best practices site:
http://www.unesco.org/most/asia1.htm