page_title: Self Employed Women's Association
hierarchical_section_title: Self Employed Women's Association
caption_attribution_description: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and SEWA Executive Director Reema Nanavaty listen as women artisans share stories of their involvement with SEWA programs that have helped them achieve economic self-sufficiency and leadership roles in the organization, at the Hansiba Store in Mumbai, India July 18, 2009. [State Department photo]
context_page_description: Self-Employed Women's Association, meaning "service" in several Indian languages, is a trade union based in Ahmedabad, India that promotes the rights of low-income, independently employed female workers. With over 1.6 million participating women, SEWA is the largest organization of informal workers in the world and largest non-profit in India. Self-employed women are defined as those who do not receive a salary like that of formally-employed workers and therefore have a more precarious income and life. SEWA is framed around the goal of full employment in which a women secures for her family: income, food, health care, child care, and shelter. The principles behind accomplishing these goals are struggle and development, meaning negotiating with stakeholders and providing services, respectively.
  SEWA was founded in 1972 by Gandhian and civil rights leader Ela Bhatt as a branch of Textile Labour Association, a labour union founded by Gandhi in 1918. The organization grew very quickly, with 30,000 members in 1996, to 318,527 in 2000, to 1,919,676 in 2013. Contemporaneous with this uptick in members is a change in India's economy and society.
context_section_description: Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), meaning "service" in several Indian languages, is a trade union based in Ahmedabad, India that promotes the rights of low-income, independently employed female workers. With over 1.6 million participating women, SEWA is the largest organization of informal workers in the world and largest non-profit in India (Chen et al. 2015). Self-employed women are defined as those who do not receive a salary like that of formally-employed workers and therefore have a more precarious income and life. SEWA is framed around the goal of full employment in which a women secures for her family: income, food, health care, child care, and shelter. The principles behind accomplishing these goals are struggle and development, meaning negotiating with stakeholders and providing services, respectively.
  SEWA was founded in 1972 by Gandhian and civil rights leader Ela Bhatt as a branch of Textile Labour Association (TLA), a labour union founded by Gandhi in 1918. The organization grew very quickly, with 30,000 members in 1996, to 318,527 in 2000, to 1,919,676 in 2013. Contemporaneous with this uptick in members is a change in India's economy and society. Liberalizing the economy to foreign trade in 1991 caused a huge migration of rural inhabitants to Indian cities that then forced urban dwellers into informal occupations. Since the financial crisis of 2008, over 90% of India's working population was in the informal sector(Shakuntala 2015); yet 94% of working women in 2009 worked in the informal sector (Bhatt 2009). India's history and modern culture of female subjugation also contributes to this disparity because traditional gender roles exclude women from regular, secure forms of labour.
caption: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and SEWA Executive Director Reema Nanavaty listen as women artisans share stories of their involvement with SEWA at the Hansiba Store in Mumbai, India 18 July 2009.
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