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SEWA
(Self Employed Women's Association): www.sewa.org
The organisation with the most extensive experience in organising homebased workers is SEWA, the Self Employed Women's Association, based in Ahmedabad, India.
Founded in 1972 by Ela Bhatt, SEWA is a registered trade union of women who work in the informal sector. Its membership includes women who work in a wide range of sub-sectors, including embroidery, food processing and minor forest products.
While new opportunities in both domestic and export markets exist, it's hard for individual women to reach these markets on their own. To help women gain access to emerging markets, SEWA has organized women into production and marketing cooperatives.
At the domestic level, there have been some successes:
- SEWA has helped women salt processors - who would otherwise have to sell salt to middlemen - sell directly to salt factories at much higher prices.
- Women gum collectors who previously had to sell their gum to a government-run corporation were assisted in obtaining licenses to sell instead on the open market and explore regional markets where prices were higher.
- More recently, SEWA has begun to explore ways in which it can assist its members to break into export markets, focussing initially on embroidered goods.
Click here to read Ela Bhatt's personal account of working over the years for the improvemnt of Self-Employed Women.
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