Self-Employed Women's Association Research Articles

Women's Capabilities and Social Justice

We come from our family’s house to live in our husband’s house. If we mention our name in this house, they say, “Oh, that is another family”. Yet when it comes to working, they say, “What you earn is ours, because you are in this family’s house”, or “because you are working on this family’s land. Let the land be registered in our names, so that we will not always feel like we are in someone else’s family”. (Santokbehn, agricultural laborer, Ahmedabad) In your joint family, I am known as the second daughter-in-law. All these years I have known myself as no more than that. Today, after efteen years, as I stand alone by the sea, I know that I have another identity, which is my relationship with the universe and its creator. That gives me the courage to write this letter as myself, not as the second daughter-in-law of your family … I am not one to die easily. That is what I want to say in this letter. (Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Letter from a Wife’, 1914) We not only want a piece of the pie, we also want to choose the eavor, and to know how to make it ourselves. (Ela Bhatt, founder, Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), 1992)

Globalization and Home-Based Workers

Globalization presents threats to and opportunities for women working in the informal sector. The paper, which draws on the work of Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) Global Markets Program and of HomeNet, focuses on women home-based workers and analyzes, within the framework of global value-chains, the impact of globalization on labor relations and other market transactions. The chains reviewed are: manufactured goods (fashion garments); agricultural products (nontraditional exports); and nontimber forest products (shea butter). The paper shows how this form of analysis helps to identify the uneven distribution of power and returns within the chains – between rich and poor and between women and men. It concludes by emphasizing the importance of the work of the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), HomeNet, and StreetNet in organizing home-based workers, both locally and internationally, as well as that of WIEGO in supporting them.

Women, Empowerment, and Economic Development

Development policies and programs tend not to view women as integral to the economic development process. This is reflected in the higher investments in women's reproductive rather than their productive roles, mainly in population programs. Yet women throughout the developing world engage in economically productive work and earn incomes. They work primarily in agriculture and in the informal sector and, increasingly, in formal wage employment. Their earnings, however, are generally low. Since the 1950s, development agencies have responded to the need for poor women to earn incomes by making relatively small investments in income-generating projects. Often such projects fail because they are motivated by welfare and not development concerns, offering women temporary and part-time employment in traditionally feminine skills such as knitting and sewing that have limited markets. By contrast, over the past twenty years, some nongovernmental organizations, such as the Self-Employed Women's Association in India, have been effective in improving women's economic status because they have started with the premise that women are fundamental to the process of economic development.

Microentrepreneurs and homeworkers: Convergent categories

Home-based workers are not easily identified as either self-employed or dependent workers because these categories of employment status fail to capture gender subordination which is particularly salient in the case of home-based work. Yet development practitioners tend to treat homebased workers as self-employed microentrepreneurs, providing them credit and training. Unions, on the other hand, consider them exploited workers, push for the enforcement of labour laws and sometimes have begun to organize homeworkers and bargain collectively on their behalf. We present the cases of the Self-Employed Women's Association of India and the West Yorkshire Homeworking Group of Great Britain as examples of successful organizations which support home-based workers by combining microenterprise development and union organizing.

The Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) in India: Feminist, Gandhian Power in DevelopmentCoping with Seasonality and Drought. Martha Alter ChenWhere Women Are Leaders: The SEWA Movement in India. Kalima Rose

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview ArticleThe Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) in India: Feminist, Gandhian Power in Development . Martha Alter Chen Coping with Seasonality and Drought. Martha Alter Chen Where Women Are Leaders: The SEWA Movement in India. Kalima Rose Howard SpodekHoward Spodek Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Economic Development and Cultural Change Volume 43, Number 1Oct., 1994 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/452141 Views: 25Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1994 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Archana, Marsha A. Dickson Social Sustainability in Apparel Supply Chains: Organizational Practices for Managing Sub-Contracted Homework, (May 2017): 193–216.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51253-2_10Mahasweta M. Banerjee Micro-Enterprise Development: A Response to Poverty, Journal of Community Practice 5, no.1-21-2 (Jun 1998): 63–83.https://doi.org/10.1300/J125v05n01_05

Banking on Self-Employment

The women of India have added new meaning to trade unionism and women's empowerment. The organisation of 50 000 self-employed women into a trade union, which embraces a diverse range of ‘informal’ economic activities in both rural and urban India, is an unprecedented accomplishment. Members of the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) came out to South Africa to celebrate the launch of South Africa's version, the Self-Employed Women's Union (SEWU). Shqfika Isaacs speaks to Ayesha Bombaywala, Ranjan Desai, Ramilah Parmar, Champa Patni, Manali Shah and Karima Shaik

Credit Worthiness of Poor Women: A Comparison of Some Minimalist Credit Programmes in Asia: A Preliminary Analysis

The recognition of credit as a powerful instrument for the alleviation of poverty in the developing countries has led to a multitude of programmes on agricultural credit, co-operatives, and integrated rural development in the past few decades. Agricultural or land development banks, commercial banks and cooperatives have sought "small borrowers" in theory but have, on the whole, failed to reach the poor, particularly women. The loan repayment rates in these programmes often have been very low which, together with below-market interest rates imposed by governments, has resulted in the stagnation of most third world credit institutions aimed at "small borrowers". On the other hand, innovative Credit Delivery Systems (CDSs) for the poor or "poverty lending" has been on the increase in many developing countries over the last two or three decades. In stark contrast to the conventional credit programmes, these innovative experiments show. extremely high repayment rates. More importantly, they reveal that the standard stereotypes are wildly inaccurate: that women are more creditworthy than men and the poor more creditworthy than the non-poor. These experiments include the Bedan Kredit Kecamatan (BKK), MBM and YIS programmes in Indonesia, Grameen Bank and Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) in Bangladesh, Agha Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP) in Pakistan, Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA) and Working Women's Forum (WWF) in India, the Kababaihang Barangay of San Miguel, Bulacan (KBB) in the Philippines, Production Credit for Rural Women (pCRW) in Nepal, etc.

Toward empowerment

Some 94 percent of working women in India are self-employed — as home-based workers, petty traders, or providers of other services and manual labor. They are undercounted in official statistics, unprotected by labor laws, without access to health care, skills training, or credit. Their situation worsens as traditional support systems break down. SEWA — the Self-Employed Women's Association — was formed as a trade union to give these women political visibility and power over the forces that control their lives. Each stage of the organizing process has been, and continues to be, a struggle. But it is succeeding.

Development as liberation: Policy lessons from case studies

Four case studies are summarized in which oppressed people have successfully assumed control over their own destinies and development strategies. Lessons from experience are drawn, at the national and macro-economic level, from Guinea-Bissau where the popular liberation movement has grown into the national government without losing close contact with its constituency; from the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka which has started as a modest development organization of poor people, based on indigenous social and cultural values, and which has grown into a popular movement of 1 million people (of 14 million total population) in some 2000 villages; from the SEWA (Self-Employed Women's Association) in Ahmedabad, India, where oppressed street vendors, artisans, junksmiths and garment-makers have founded their own bank (which now has 1000 shareholders and 10,000 depositors) to circumvent usurious lending practices and to gain access to capital at their own terms; and from a Quechua community in central Bolivia where handicrafts producers' cooperatives have successfully maintained self-reliance and cultural identity through conscious choice of appropriate technology at their own terms. Lessons on development as a form of liberation are drawn from the social praxis of each of these examples.