Comprehending SEWA

I'd heard about the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and its founder Ela Bhatt, but I'd never really understood what it and she achieved. SEWA began in the Indian state of Gujarat in 1972 as a trade union for self-employed women, whom we today call microentrepreneurs or informal workers. Yet its members neither share a common trade nor have employers to strike against, making for a peculiar sort of trade union (in my eyes). SEWA started its own bank in 1974 and an insurance program called Vimo SEWA in 1992.This web page of the Global Development Research Center links to documents that helped me understand better. An article by Smita Srinivas describes SEWA's early victories in asserting their members' rights (against the harassing police) to do business such as hawking in public places. And this excerpt from an article Elisabeth Bumiller wrote for the Washington Post on the occasion of First Lady Hillary Clinton's 1995 trip to India finely translates SEWA's story into language I can understand:

Bhatt is the founder and driving force of a now-famous women's organization in India, called SEWA, that holds to the simple yet radical belief that poor women need organizing, not welfare. (SEWA is the acronym for the Self-Employed Women's Association and corresponds to the Indian word sewa, for service.) Based in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, a dusty old textile town on the edge of the Gujarati desert, SEWA is at its core a trade union for the self-employed. In other words, it offers union membership to the illiterate women who sell vegetables for 50 cents a day in the city markets, or who pick up paper scraps for recycling from the streets - jobs that most Indian men don't consider real work....

Up until then, I'll confess, the phrase "a trade union for the self-employed" made my eyes glaze over. But when I traveled to Ahmedabad in the fall of 1987, what I saw opened up my world.Consider the SEWA bank. When I first walked through the doors one stifling hot October day, I was greeted by a festive cacophony of illiterate but purposeful women, some eating lunch on the floor, others nursing babies along the sides of the room. The bank was where they socialized, or, in our dialect, networked.The SEWA bank now has 61,000 members, assets of $4 million and customers who walk in each day to deposit a dollar or take out 60 cents. On that day I had gone in to see the bank's managing director, Jayashree Vyas, who had stacks of loan applications covering her desk. When I asked her about them, she selected one from the pile. The form said that Maniben Parmar, a seamstress, had just been approved for a $400 loan. Maniben Parmar bought her cloth from a middleman, made 30 cents a day and had $8 saved in the SEWA bank. She had four children and a husband who worked at the telephone office; he made a relatively good salary of $120 a month.Maniben Parmar wanted to borrow money to make house repairs. A friend, Ashaben, had recommended her. "It's not for a productive purpose," Vyas admitted to me. "But it's for improving their living standards." Although her husband's income had helped her secure the money, the loan would be in Maniben Parmar's name alone. Her husband could not make withdrawals from her savings account, nor could he apply for a loan of his own.To Ela, this was the centerpiece of the SEWA bank. For years, she often said, women had been treated "like dirt" by traditional Indian bankers. Worse, women had no place to hide their savings from husbands and sons. With the SEWA bank, Ela explained - in the gentle tone that softened the daring of her thinking - "we will be able to nonviolently, in the most Gandhian way, eliminate the husbands' [total control]."

I'd be interest in other tellings of the SEWA story---post links if you know of any. I see now that the women's banking movement in developing countries preceded the microfinance movement. We hear more about the latter in large part because it reached millions of people (SEWA Bank has just 22,000 customers) and perhaps also because its proponents were more skilled at telling its story in ways Westerners like me respond to.Update: That's 22,000 borrowers. SEWA reports a respectable 308,000 savers, which I overlooked.