20091023 - Visit to Mahila Housing SEWA Trust

SEWA stands for Self Employed Women´s Association. It is an organisation of poor, self-employed women workers. These are women who earn a living through their own labour or small businesses. For more information, see: http://www.sewa.org/.

Mahila Housing SEWA Trust (MHST) is a great example of inventive work to improve the living standards for women. It was established when SEWA Bank realised that women wanted to improve their houses. House improvement leads to:

gain a lot of time (as women do not have to spend time to clean the floor, fetch water far away, etc.)

better education for the children

social status

higher income

Currently, MHST has various interesting programmes. The most remarkable MHST programme in my opinion is the Karmika Project. This is a school where women learn to become construction workers. In the western world, women rarely work in construction. The same was the situation in India with one difference: the women worked in construction in the low salary jobs (e.g. carry stones to the site; earnings of 50-60 IDR per day). After the training, women can work as assistant helper (earnings of 80 - 125 IDR per day) or as master mason (earnings: no limit).

We got a chance to see the women on a training site, learning how to build a wall. This was really interesting, especially as they seemed to manage to do so wearing a sari !!!

We visited a slum as field research. This time we met the women living in the slum that were appointed as slum representatives for SEWA. They were happy to answer our questions (for instance on how their lives were improved after getting running water, electricity and several other improvements due to SEWA intervention). The following video gives an impression of such a field research interview.

At the end of the interview, the women told us that life was a lot better now SEWA has provided the means for running water (connection etc.) for the slum. However, the water company recently shut them off...