Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA)

The world of work has been steadily transitioning to a data-driven economy where development priorities, policy advocacy, and socio-economic strategies are being generated and extracted at a high level with minimal input or ownership from worker organizations on the ground. Multiple barriers have prevented informal workers and grassroots organizations from playing a central role, foremost of which has been the limited capacity of the informal sector to collect, assess and disseminate essential information to development advocates and policy-makers.

Global Fairness Initiative believes that local, grassroots-based entities have the right to set the standards for data collection. By working with partners in anchor locations, GFI is instituting a model of data collection that is worker-centric and locally produced and owned. We work within the local context to empower organizations to define key issues and create sustainable solutions rooted in equity and women’s empowerment. With knowledge building being core to the model, we use a bottoms-up, comprehensive Trainer of Trainer (TOT) strategy to augment the internal capacity of community partners, research enumerators, and worker unions.

In collaboration with regional data specialists, grassroots entities have hands-on experience learning and using proper methodologies and research techniques, planning implementation strategies, conducting questionnaires and facilitating focus group discussion, using data collection software, compiling information, and analyzing results to enhance awareness about workers and their rights. This responsive, real-time data is retained by those closest to the issue to provide them with targeted information necessary for effective bargaining power with government and external stakeholders, thus leading to more effective and sustainable changes for workers. Engagement at the grassroots level serves to bridge the ‘data divide’, and engenders local communities to make informed decisions and fosters social and economic development driven by workers themselves.

Over the past decade, climate disasters in India have upended thousands of small and marginal producers and workers lives and livelihoods. Across sectors, informal and vulnerable workers, primarily women, are disproportionately impacted by climate change and are pushed further into poverty as they struggle on the front lines of the climate crises.

Since 2000, the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and the American India Foundation (AIF) have worked to enhance financial stability and prosperity for its members through the transition to green technology and into the green economy in what is termed as building ‘climate resilience’. SEWA and AIF help build the skills, capacity, and confidence of workers to have livelihood security and resources to withstand the changing physical landscape and the significant increase of climate and economic shocks.

In 2024, Global Fairness Initiative (GFI), an international NGO with experience in evaluating economic empowerment of women, assessed the impact of SEWA’s and AIF’S on-going initiatives designed to engender inclusive financial growth and development through climate resilience. The following report focuses specifically on SEWA’s and AIF’s efforts, and the economic and social impact of those efforts, while also articulating the investment framework and financial partners and model used within each case study. The purpose of the report is to present different case examples of climate-linked financial models and their scope, structure and impact.

Through primary and secondary data collection, GFI’s assessment found that small and marginal producers, mainly women, gain stability and security as a result of targeted financial solutions that address specific climate challenges. When initial investments are activated, women producers reported sustained increases in their income, and a reinvestment of their income into their businesses and to climate friendly solutions linked to livelihood security. Furthermore, opportunities for expanded investments by SEWA and AIF to sustain and scale up successful models can provide further wrap-around support to deepen resilience against climate shocks for workers and communities.