The Self Employed Women's Assoication. SEWA was born in 1972 as a trade union of self employed women. It grew out of the Textile Labour Association. TLA, India's oldest and largest union of textile workers founded in 1920 by a women, Anasuya Sa

2. Trade committees (Dhandhha Samiti)

• SEWA members are workers who have no fixed employee-employer relationship and depend on their own labour for survival. They are poor, illiterate and vulnerable. They barely have any assets or working capital. But they are extremely economically active, contributing very significantly to the economy and society with their labour. In fact, 64% of GDP is accounted for by the self – employed of our country

There are four types of self-employed women workers:

1.  Vendors and small women business:

• Like Hawkers, vendors and small business women like vegetable, fruit, fish, egg and other vendors of food items, household goods and clothes vendors :

2. Home based workers:

• Like weavers, potters, bidi and agarbatti workers, papad rollers, ready-made garment workers, women who process agricultural products and artisans

3. Manual workers & service providers:

• Like agricultural labourers, construction workers, contract labourers, handcart   pullers, head – loaders, domestic workers      and laundry workers. In addition to  these three categories there is emergence of another category of women workers.

4. Producer & services:

• 2009 SEWA Membership      

• All - India Membership year - 2009      

• Growth of SEWA's Membership : 1973-2009 (India)

GOALS OF SEWA:

• SEWA specialy organize for women’s employement.  poor women’s growth, development and employment occurs when they have work and income security and food security. It also occurs when they are healthy, able to access child care and have a roof over their heads.

• In order to ensure that we are moving in the direction of our two goals of:

1.FULL EMPLOYEMENT:

It means employment whereby workers obtain work security, income security, food security and social security (at least health care, child care and shelter). SEWA organises women to ensure that every family obtains full employment.

2.SELF RELIANCE:

It means that women should be autonomous and self-reliant, individually and collectively, both economically and in terms of their decision-making ability.

SEWA’S SERVICE:

• Supportive services like savings and credit, health care, child care, insurance, legal aid, capacity building and communication services are important needs of poor women. If women are to achieve their goals of full employment and self-reliance, these services are essential. Recognising the need for supportive services, SEWA has helped women take a number of initiatives in organising these services for themselves

Here is supportive services of SEWA:

1. SEWA BANK

2. HEALTH CARE

1. CHILD CARE
2. VIMO SEWA(SEWA INSURANCE)
3. LEGAL SERVICES
4. HOUSING AND INFRASTRUCTURE
5. VIDEO SEWA

1.SEWA BANK:

• Swashrayi Mahila Sewa Sahakari Bank:
• Swashrayi Mahila Sewa Sahakari Bank is SEWA members' largest cooperative, the first of its kind in india. The bank is owned by the self-employed women as share holders; policies are formulated by their own elected Board of women workers. The Bank is professionally run by qualified managers accountable to the Board.
• SEWA Bank was established in 1974 with 4000 members each contributed Rs.10 as share capital. Today there are 2,76,684 poor women depositers.
• Swashrayi Mahila Sewa Cooperative was the first of its kind. In fact, obtaining  M     Reserve Bank of India clearance for this women's bank was itself a long struggle-

It has always been financially sound and viable, earning surpluses and dividends for its share-holders.

SEWA Bank(2005-2006)

• SEWA Bank's Schemes to Promote Capitalization  

    

2.HEALTH CARE:

• SEWA has helped its members obtain health care which is run by women themselves. Our approach emphasizes health education as well as curative care. It also involves coordination and collaboration with government health services for immunization, micronutrient supplementation, family planning, tuberculosis control and care at public hospitals, dispensaries and primary health centers.

      THE ACTIVITIES OF THE SEWA HEALTH CARE TEAM INCLUDE:

1. Provision of preventive health service:

• Health information and education ,including weighing, including information on HIV/AIDS ;
• Ante-natal care(ANC), including weighing,screening for anaemia,and nutrition, counselling ;
• Skills up-gradation(of all SEWA Health Functionaries)and training of midwivies ;

2. Promotion of health and wealth being. Health education and information is made available through a six-module training programme for sewa members and slightly modified programmes for their husbands, adolescent girls and boys and traditional midwivies.
3. Provision of curative health services,including;

• Low cost medicines;
• Treatment of tuberculosis through DOTS method and screening and treating diagnosed;
• Mobile clinics called ’camps’ for reproductive health problems, children’s and General health problems;
• Accupressure therapy
• Ayurvedic(traditional medicine) treatment

• OUTREACH OF SEWA HEALTH:

     

 3. CHILD CARE:

 - SEWA Childcare through Cooperatives & Local Organisations In Ahmedabad, Sangini Child Care Workers' Cooperative is running centres for infants and young children. It has linked with the ICDS         and social Welfare  Board.        
- In Kheda district, Shaishav Child Care Workers' Cooperatives is running centres for 0 to 6 year old children of tobacco workers and agricultural labourers.
- In Surendranagar district, the Balvikas mandal and local organisation runs Child Care centres for children of salt workers. It is running Balvadis (day care cantre) in villages bordering the desert, the little Rann of Kutch and in the desert itself alongside the saltpans.

Immunizations at child care center

4.VIMO SEWA(SEWA INSURANCE)

• SEWA started an integrated insurance scheme to support women in times of crisis. Operative since 1992 in collaboration with our nationalised insurance companies, it has demonstrated that insurance for the poor can be run in a self-reliant and -financially viable way. 32,000 -members were covered this year through an annual individual premium of Rs.60. This gave them some protection against the various crises that continuosly threaten their lives and work. An additional Rs.15 per annum ensured that their husbands got life insurance; a widowhood insurance for women at their own insistence.

Insurance outreach:

5.LEGAL SERIVCE

• SEWA's experience in organising workers over the past twenty-six years has shown that they have to face the law and the police frequently at various times in their lives. Hence, since the very beginning, SEWA has been providing legal education and support in court cases to its members. In addition, we have been running a legal advisory centre at SEWA which accepts cases and complaints lodged by members. These include:

1. Vendors' cases with regard to harassment by municipal corporation, traffic police and resident and consumer associations. It also includes their space-related complaints and those concerning consfiscation of their goods by the authorities.
2. Bidiworkers' cases on Provident Fund mentioned earlier, as well as regarding dismissal from work and stoppage of all work to SEWA members.
   In addition, 119 agarbatti workers who were to lose their homes due to road-widening by the town planning department, filed a case in the court against this plan.
3. Workmen's compensation cases for injured construction workers and those engaged in small factories for non-payment of wages by contractors.

6.HOUSING AND INFRASTRUCTURE:

MAHILA HOUSING SEWA TRUST:

                 Urban activities

• .Transforming Slums to Colonies
• Consistent with the UN Millennium Development Goals to “significantly improve the lives of 100 million slum dwellers by 2020”, and “to halve by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and sanitation”.
• Nitially, MHT participated in the programme as a local partnering NGO to mobilize the slum residents to participate in the upgradation process. Later on, on the insistence of the beneficiaries and CBOs, MHT undertook construction of infrastructure in the slums. As on December 2009, 3386 houses in 45 slums of Ahmedabad city have been upgraded through the SNP with the partnership of CBOs, AMC and MHT.

-Number of Slum Residents Accessing Infrastructural Services with the Support of MHT

(December 31, 2009)

-Providing Legal Electric Connections in Poor Households:

• A majority of the households from poor areas/slums of the cities lacks documents of land tenure, without which they are not able to access electricity from the concerned electricity boards in their area. MHT initiated a programme called Ujala Yojna where in Ahmedabad Electricity Board (AEC) delinked tenure of land with availing electricity connection and substituted it with an indemnity bond which requires slum dwellers to sign an agreement stating that they would not pursue any legal proceeding with AEC if they were evicted or relocated from their homes in future.
• As a result over 100,000 houses in the slums of Ahmedabad have accessed legal electricity connections.  The major objectives of the programme are:
• To ensure availability of safe and legal electricity supply to slum communities,
• To minimize process time for new connections and to organize and operate an efficient bill recovery system,
• To eliminate unauthorized use of electricity by regularizing connection and minimizing techno-commercial losses,
• To involve slum dwellers in the supply and payment of dues through representative CBOs, and- to develop strategies for scaling up the programme at local, state, and national level.

 Towards Secure Housing:

• Many poor have purchased houses from Slum Clearance Board (SCB) in Ahmedabad but most of them do not have the legal documents to prove their ownership. As a result they are not able to access housing loans from financial institutions. In fact only 10 per cent of the households, who have purchased house from SCB, have legal documents. Most of them are unaware of the long and cumbersome procedure of the SCB to legalize their ownership. As a result many house owners have not paid all the installments due to the SCB.

• MHT has extended a helping hand and the concerned households have restarted the process required to get the legal documents of their house, which includes deposit of pending amounts in the bank (also facilitated loans from the bank, if needed), helping people to acquire the needed documents for processing, etc. MHT also motivated people to pay the installments along with the penalty amount to SCB, so that they can ask for the documents -regarding their ownership of the house. Till date, many rightful owners of the house have succeeded with the assistance of MHT to get the legal documents.
• MHT also provides information to its members on the following:
• Available low income housing with government agencies, and
• Available plots specifically for LIG/EWS people.

           Rural activities;

• Study revealed that a large number of rural homes are either kuchha or semi-pucca, which requires frequent maintenance - particularly in adverse weather conditions such as heavy monsoons. For the rural poor the desire to own a durable pucca home, with the option of being able to extend and add extra rooms when necessary gets the highest priority. In order to respond to such needs, MHT collaborated with the Government of Gujarat and constructed over 1200 houses in the districts of Patan, Surendranagar, Kutch, Anand, Vadodara and Kheda. 
• Achieve this goal a list of semi-skilled men and women masons was prepared and then they were trained in the method of earthquake resistance construction. Gram Samitis were formulated in each village to ensure that the process was participatory. Also, Sandesh Yatras (Message Rallies) were conducted in 147 villages to generate awareness about earthquake resistant construction principles. -Under this programme, MHT constructed 5017 permanent shelters, 511 semi     permanent shelters, and 3122 toilets.

• In January 2001, a major earthquake hit Gujarat, which killed more than 20,000 people, injured 167,000 people and destroyed nearly 400,000 homes. SEWA responded to the crisis by actively participating in the reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts in the affected areas of the state. Under the aegis of SEWA, MHT launched Naya Ghar Rural Housing Programme and collaborated with the local communities to construct disaster resistant houses in the severely affected districts of Kutch, Patan and Surendrenagar.The programme also attempted to teach the community to adopt safe and scientific building practices, mobilize the community workers for reconstruction of earthquake affected houses, and to generate alternative livelihood through reconstruction activity.

Reconstruction of Houses, Post Earthquake in Gujarat

• The long term achievements of the programme are:
• Trained  300 skilled and 400 semi skilled masons in disaster resistance construction. Some of these masons are working in Sardar Awaas Yojana (SAY) (a housing scheme), implemented jointly by Government of Gujarat and MHT, in the districts not affected by earthquake.
• Expanded the  institutional  capacity of MHT to construct houses in collaboration with local communities on a large scale.

 

• VIDEO SEWA:

• This year SEWA obtained new equipment in keeping with the fast paced changes in communication technology. In this way, Video SEWA’s professional standards and competence is enhanced.

SEWA’S SERVICE AND WOMEN: