WHO’S WHO IN MICROFINANCE: Ela Ramesh Bhatt, Founder of the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) in India

Dr. Ela Ramesh Bhatt is the founder of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a development organization based in India dedicated to the economic empowerment of the poorest and most oppressed women in India. A lawyer by training, Dr. Bhatt is widely respected among the international labor, cooperative, women, and micro-finance movements and is also one of the founders of Women’s World Banking, the New York based global network of microfinance providers and banks dedicated to ‘expanding the economic assets, participation and power of poor women’ by providing them access to finance, knowledge and markets.

Ms. Bhatt was born on September 7, 1933 in Ahmedabad, India. The second of three daughters, Ms. Bhatt grew up in a well-to-do family and was deeply interested and active in social causes. She attended the Gujarat University in Ahmedabad, India receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1952 and later enrolled for a degree in law during which time Ms. Bhatt was awarded a Gold Medal for her outstanding work in Hindu law in 1954. While in college Ms. Bhatt volunteered to work on the 1951 census of India. This experience of seeing firsthand the dismal conditions in which the poor lived made Ms. Bhatt, who was already influenced by the writings of great thinkers including Mahatma Gandhi and Leo Tolstoy, decide that she would devote her life to working for the poor.

Dr. Bhatt initially taught English briefly at the University of Bombay before she joined the legal department of the Textile Labour Association (TLA) in Ahmedabad at the invitation of two of the organization’s founders in 1955. After a stint with the union’s legal department and a position at the Labor Ministry of the state of Gujarat, she was asked by the TLA to head it’s women’s wing in 1968. In connection with this, Dr. Bhatt also traveled to Israel where she studied at the Afro-Asian Institute of Labor and Cooperatives in Tel Aviv for three months, receiving the International Diploma of Labor and Cooperatives in 1971.

Dr Bhatt observed that while there were state laws in India which protected the interests of industrial workers, there were none which protected the interest of self-employed women. Well aware that thousands of wives and daughters of textile workers, as well as other women, toiled as self-employed garment makers, vegetable vendors, junk-smiths and hawkers to supplement the family income, Dr. Bhatt discovered that self-employed women were not even included in the 1971 Census as workers. Shuttling between urban areas and the nearby villages, the self-employed women were unorganized, unprotected, and economically weak and had no bargaining power. This prompted Dr. Bhatt and her co-workers to conduct a survey to assess the socio-economic conditions of self-employed women, followed by surveys of women in the job fields of vegetable vendor, garment maker, used garment vendor, junk-smith and milkmaid. Profiles of Self-Employed Women (1975) written by Dr. Bhatt summarizes many of the findings from these studies. Based on the studies, Bhatt found that 97 percent of those studied lived in slums, 93 percent were illiterates and large percentages in each group were in debt. Among other common problems for these women were shortage of capital, shortage of raw materials, inadequacy of work place and extremely high interest rates on money borrowed for daily rental of means of production or stock purchase.

Following the survey findings, Dr. Ela Bhatt undertook to organize these self-employed women into a union under the auspices of the Women’s Wing of the TLA, in co-operation with the then president of TLA, of Arvind Buch. Finally in 1972, the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) was established with Mr. Buch as president and Dr. Bhatt as the general-secretary. To date, SEWA has been helping poor self-employed women workers obtain benefits of full employment such as work security, income security, food security and social security (at least health care, child care and shelter). As of 2006, SEWA had a member base comprising of nearly 950,000 poor Indian women. To alleviate the dependency of these self-employed women on moneylenders who demanded extremely high interest rates, SEWA also launched its own co-operative bank, Shri Mahila SEWA Sahakari Bank Limited (The Mahila SEWA Cooperative Bank, Ltd.) in 1974 to provide low interest loans to its members. The bank lends to women directly in addition to providing them guidance for financial management, marketing of goods and purchase of necessary materials. The SEWA Bank is also involved in second-tier lending to microfinance institutions (MFIs). As of March 2008, the SEWA Bank had 307, 558 savers, 21, 826 borrowers, total assets worth USD 25,107,160 and a debt to equity ratio of 433.93 percent.

Dr. Ela Bhatt is also a member The Elders, the eminent group of world leaders convened by former South African President Nelson Mandela in association with the international women and children’s rights advocate Graca Machel and the South African cleric and activist Desmond Tutu. This group of world leaders was convened in July 2007 in Johannesburg, South Africa, to contribute their wisdom, independent leadership and integrity to tackle some of the world’s toughest problems and Dr. Ela Bhatt was one of its founding members. Other founding members of this group also include former Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan and Dr. Muhammad Yunus; please lookup here for a detailed list of the founding members.

In 1979, Dr. Bhatt founded the Women’s World Banking along with Esther Ocloo and Michaela Walsh, and served as its chair from 1980 to 1998. Dr. Bhatt is also the founder and chair of Sa-Dhan, the All India Association of Micro Finance Institutions in India serving as an association of 196 Indian MFIs. Sa-Dhan works to improve standards, disseminate best practices and contact policy makers with the goal of improving microfinance services in India. Together, the organizations that comprise Sa-Dhan have a gross loan portfolio of approximately USD 3.5 billion and a total of over 7 million borrowers. A list of member organizations of Sa-Dhan and their financial data can be found here.

Dr. Bhatt is also the founder-chair of the Indian School of Micro-finance for Women located in the city of Ahmedabad. In addition, Dr. Bhatt served as Chair of the International Alliance of Street Vendors and the International Alliance of Home-based Workers (HomeNet), is the founding chair of the WIEGO Steering Committee (a global research and policy network working to improve the status of poor women) and is also a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Dr. Bhatt has received numerous awards for her contribution towards social improvement. Dr. Bhatt was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership in 1977, the Right Livelihood Award in 1984, the George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award, the Légion d’honneur by France, the Festive Madrid award by the Queen of Spain and the Mayor of Madrid and also the Human Rights Award by the American Labor Federation conferred by the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She was also awarded the civilian honor of Padma Shri by the Government of India in 1985, and the Padma Bhushan in 1986. In June 2001, Dr. Bhatt was granted an honorary Doctorate degree in Humane Letters by Harvard University. Dr. Bhatt has also been given honorary degrees by Yale University and the University of Natal in South Africa.