Community Groups Helped Women in India Survive COVID-19 Pandemic
April 16, 2024
Self-employed women in India, who work together in groups, largely survived the COVID 19 pandemic because of their cooperation. This is the finding of a survey of more than 1,000 households and insights from 30 hours of oral histories of members of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA).
For more than a century, it has been known that social factors influence community health outcomes more than anything else, Satchit Balsari, who led the research, told an online publication of the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University. He added, “I don’t think we fully recognize how hard it is to strengthen” social factors and that there are no “quick fixes for generations of deprivation. Organizations like SEWA show what it takes to make resilient communities.”
SEWA’s goals are full employment and self-reliance for poor women who work in a range of trades including, as tailors, cooks, garbage collectors, construction laborers and cleaners. They have no protections since there are few labor laws or social programs.
Using a strategy of setting up both unions and co-operatives, SEWA seeks to meet the needs of the worker as a laborer and a woman. It has set up 4813 self-help groups, 160 cooperatives, 15 economic federations and three companies.
