New challenges for women campaigners

BBC NEWS | South Asia | By Kirsty Hughes : "Women's organisations also face growing challenges from globalisation which is leading to rapid changes in products, skills and technology that its members are ill-equipped to face. One of these organisations is Sewa - the Self Employed Women's Association - that has been working from Ahmedabad for 33 years to address these challenges.

Sewa is India's first and largest union in the informal, unprotected sector -93% of India's workforce is in this sector- and claims to have 700,000 members across seven states. The organisation runs 60 rural and urban literacy classes for girls and women across Gujarat.

It has taught illiterate women to operate video cameras and to film their working lives, trained grassroots activists to go out and offer help to women with their most pressing problems - from small loans, to minimum wages, access to water, health insurance, work skills, and childcare. It has taught rural barefoot doctors.

Early on they realised that the poorest women had no access to finance and so they set up their own bank. If the women saved regularly, even only a few rupees a week, they got a loan. When some women defaulted on loans, Sewa discovered that a short period of ill-health could provoke financial crisis. So they set up health insurance and started providing basic health training. Sewa has a long track record in promoting cooperatives.

Women garment-workers who work at home, producing perhaps 24 garments in 8 hours, for a total wage of 15-18 rupees, who don't know where their work comes from or goes to, are powerless. But organising them into marketing cooperatives, cutting out two or three layers of middle-men, can transform the situation.

Sewa also worked in the camps for Hindus and Muslims displaced by the communal riots in Gujarat in 2002 violence, and is committed to supporting some of the orphans through to adulthood. But some observers criticise Sewa and other 'Gandhian' organisations in Gujarat for not publicly denouncing the violence.

Sewa is meeting this challenges posed by globalisation head-on through moving into business. Its marketing organisation - the Gram Mahila Haat - for its rural producers, covers agricultural and forest products, salt and handloom weavers. "