Work-focused Responses to Disasters: India’s Self Employed Women’s Association

By Francie Lund, Tony Vaux on January 01, 2010

The Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA) of India was born out of poorer women's need for secure work. SEWA was founded in 1972 by lawyer Ela Bhatt, who was the head of the women's wing of the Textile Labour Association. With a membership of over 690,000 workers in 2004 (Chen et al. 2006: 7), it is now well-known for its Gandhian principle of self-reliance and comprehensive approach to development. SEWA's members are all working women, who may be self-employed or informal wage workers who generally earn less and are in more precarious work than men. From the start SEWA focused on averting the kinds of crises that were a ‘normal’ part of members' everyday working lives. Its central focus was security because that was what such workers lacked. In its more than 30 years of experience, it has also learnt about responding to more widespread crises. Gujarat state, where the majority of SEWA's members live and work, has been assailed by a variety of disasters in recent decades—droughts, cyclones, earthquake. In the devastating Gujarat earthquake of January 2001 nearly 20,000 people were killed, of whom more women than men constituted the total number of dead. The purpose of this chapter is to present SEWA's distinctive approach to responding to crisis. We argue that poor working women perceive disaster in a different way from the external agencies—governments and international organisations—who usually lead the response to crisis. For poorer people, the central issue of disaster response is livelihood. For women, an additional central issue is the care of their children and dependants. The responses made by SEWA to women affected by drought and then earthquake demonstrate their position that women are not victims but powerful agents for overcoming disaster and rebuilding more sustainable livelihoods.

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