A baseline view (2020)
Paula Bronstein/Getty Images/Images of Empowerment
SEWA Women’s Social Enterprises and their Members: A baseline view (2020) - 2 MB
Women working in India’s informal economy face vulnerabilities, exploitation, low wages and unsafe working conditions. SEWA, a national trade union of self-employed women workers from the informal economy, has over the last 50 years, supported women to form and run collective enterprises, to access living wages and resources and expand their agency through collective ownership.
SEWA Bharat developed a “grassroots accelerator” called the Enterprise Support System in 2019 to support women’s collective enterprises across different stages of growth. In 2020, IDinsight partnered with Imago Global Grassroots and SEWA Bharat to conduct a study on six social enterprises in the SEWA ecosystem, to understand their business performance and capacity, and the social and economic status of members engaged with the enterprise.
We conducted a phone survey of 1500+ enterprise members/shareholders, in-depth qualitative interviews with social enterprise staff members, and an analysis of enterprise financial data. We find that:
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