What does SEWA stand for? 

sewa

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. Nearly 2 million workers are members of the Self-Employed Women’s Association across 8 states in India. Self-employed women are defined as those who do not have a fixed employer-employee relationship and do not receive a fixed salary and social protection like that of formally-employed workers and therefore have a more precarious income and life. SEWA organises around the goal of full employment in which a woman secures work, income, food, and social security like health care, child care, insurance, pension 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 labor lawyer and organiser Ela Bhatt. It emerged from the Women's Wing of the Textile Labour Association (TLA), a labour union founded by Gandhi in 1918. The organisation grew very quickly, with 30,000 members in 1996, to 318,527 in 2000, to 1,919,676 in 2013., and nearly 2 million in 2023. Even before the financial crisis of 2008, over 90% of India's working population was in the informal sector (Shakuntala 2015), and 94% of working women in 2009 worked in the informal sector (Bhatt 2009). India's history and patriarchal systems also contributes to this disparity because traditional gender roles exclude women from regular, secure forms of labour.Today the SEWA movement has spread to other states of India through SEWA Bharat, an all-India federation of SEWAs. It emerged organically out of the need expressed by women workers in other states. Based in Delhi, SEWA Bharat directly supports member institutions in 8 states of India including Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Bihar while connecting members with SEWA institutions in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, and Kerala for knowledge exchange, skill-building, and resource sharing.

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