Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Oxford, UKGWAOGender Work and Organization0968-6673Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004November 2004116ACADEMIC PAPERSEARNING THEIR KEEP AND KEEPING
WHAT THEY EARNGENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

Gender, Work and Organization. Vol. 11 No. 6 November 2004

Earning Their Keep and Keeping

What They Earn: A Critique of
Organizing Strategies for South
Asian Women in the Informal Sector
Bipasha Baruah*

It is now widely understood that the needs of women workers in the infor-
mal sector are not met by the conservative practices of labour organizations
and trade unions. While the contribution of women to the economies of
developing countries is critical, women rarely find employment in the reg-
ulated unionized sectors of these countries, and are found instead in over-
whelming numbers in the sector that is variously termed ‘unorganized’,
‘unprotected’, ‘unregistered’ or ‘informal.’ This article addresses the situ-
ation of women in the informal economy in South Asia. The author
explores the major challenges and opportunities facing women in their
efforts to organize and mobilize for change. She also provides a critical
analysis of the different types of interventions adopted by the state and
civil society organizations in South Asia to empower women in the in-
formal sector. The author concludes with an attempt to identify the mix of
interventions and strategies most needed for different social, political and
economic circumstances.

Keywords: informal economy, women workers, South Asia, organization,

mobilization

Introduction

M ore than four decades of ‘development’ in the Third World have not
resulted in the predicted absorption, or even the significant displace-
ment, of marginal small-scale economic activities by large-scale technology-
intensive ventures, even in countries that have witnessed dramatic economic
growth and rapid industrialization. Brisk population growth, increasing

Address for correspondence: *Bipasha Baruah, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York Univer-
sity, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Canada M3J 1P3, e-mail: mobb@yorku.ca.

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
606 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

landlessness, inadequate social support programmes and growing rural-

urban migration are presumably some of the factors that have ensured that
large enterprises are unable to create enough jobs to absorb the swelling sup-
ply of labour. Under such circumstances, increasing numbers of urban and
rural people have been forced to, or have chosen to, create alternative sources
of employment. All such unregistered, and therefore unrecognized, manu-
facturing, service and petty trade activities have come to be known collect-
ively as the ‘informal sector’, the sector of economic activity that is not
registered with government agencies and does not comply with regulations
governing labour practices, taxes and licensing (Dignard and Havet, 1995).
In countries like India, the informal sector accounts for 93 per cent of the
total labour force and 64 per cent of gross domestic product (Jhabvala and
Subrahmanya, 2000). Because it is contradictory and unjust to describe such
a large, dynamic workforce in terms that relegate it to a peripheral position,
many authors and activists prefer to use the term ‘self-employed’, arguing
that these workers are essentially entrepreneurs, since they assume all the
risks of their businesses (Bhatt, 1995; Jhabvala, 1994). I support the use of the
term ‘self-employed’ to describe people who attempt to generate independ-
ent livelihoods under a variety of circumstances over other terms with pejor-
ative connotations such as ‘casual’ work, illegal connotations such as the
‘black economy,’ derived from the Italian lavoro nero traditionally used to
describe people with connections to the mafia, or the ‘marginal’ economy,
which fails utterly to capture the significant economic contributions of the
sector.
My concern about the use of the term ‘self-employed’ arises from the poss-
ible confusion of the meaning attributed to it by western capitalism. Self-
employment, in the context of the developed world implies making an
informed choice to pursue an independent livelihood in the presence of other
opportunities, while in the Third World an overwhelming number of people,
especially poor women, are driven to it, not out of a desire to be entrepre-
neurial, but because of a lack of options and unmet household subsistence
requirements. I will use the term ‘self-employed’ or micro-entrepreneurs to
describe workers in the informal sector in this article but within the context
of the developing world described above.

The challenges of organizing women in the informal economy

The importance of organizing workers in the informal sector to occupy a cen-
tral place in the economy hardly needs to be elaborated upon. Within such
movements, the integration and solidarity of women deserve special atten-
tion due to a variety of social, cultural, economic and political factors that
work against them. Indeed, in the face of globalizing economies and com-
petitive industrial growth, self-employed women face bleak prospects if they

Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004

EARNING THEIR KEEP AND KEEPING WHAT THEY EARN 607

remain isolated and unorganized. On the other hand, there are real possibil-
ities for empowerment if they make a collective effort to create new work
structures and institutions and broader forms of solidarity. In numbers
women find the voice and strength to influence and challenge not just local
institutions and processes but also national and international policies and
organizations. While the benefits of organizing are quite clear, the process
itself can be challenging in a variety of ways. Some of the impediments to
organizing arise from women’s weak starting positions and lack of bargain-
ing power while others are a result of the weaknesses of the organizations
representing them. In the following pages I will attempt to provide an under-
standing of some of the most persistent and widespread challenges of organ-
izing women in South Asia.

Social, cultural and occupational factors

The opposition that women and their representative organizations face from
those most likely to lose power as a result of their organized efforts to
improve working conditions, or to secure their entitlements to education,
credit, social security, technology and other necessities, appears to be a com-
mon thread in the accounts of women’s movements for solidarity. The mem-
bers of the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and the Working
Women’s Forum (WWF), both in India, had to struggle against the forces of
financial exploitation, physical abuse and social harassment from middle-
men, subcontractors, local gangs and the police in their efforts to unionize to
effect change in their lives and work (Rose, 1992; WWF, 2000). Similarly, the
clients and members of the Grameen Bank and the Bangladesh Rural
Advancement Committee (BRAC) faced serious resistance from middlemen
and moneylenders who benefited greatly from the poverty, vulnerability and
despair of poor self-employed women (Carr et al., 1996; Yunus, 1999). Since
missing even one day’s work can mean a crisis in the family, women who
earn just enough each day to keep their families going are especially vulner-
able. Terrified of losing the small sporadic income that they do have, or of
having violence committed against them, women are initially reluctant to
organize.
These inherent and widely prevalent feelings of fear, helplessness and dis-
trust are perhaps the strongest deterrents to women’s organizing efforts.
Their experiences of constantly being cheated make women very distrustful
of the motives of organizations attempting to organize them into unions, co-
operatives, banks and other bargaining collectives. Gaining women’s confi-
dence and trust is one of the most crucial hurdles that organizations must get
over before they can make a difference in their lives. While women’s illiteracy
and their lack of knowledge of the law can also serve as impediments,
the experiences of organizations like SEWA, BRAC and Proshika that
have worked consistently over the years to identify and remedy such

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004 Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004

608 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

shortcomings reveal that they do not pose insurmountable problems. Indeed,

many women traditionally considered ‘illiterate’ have gone on to hold posi-
tions of authority with aplomb within such organizations. SEWA, BRAC and
the Grameen Bank have also attested that having an inadequate formal edu-
cation did not impede the decision-making capacity of members of their
boards. Jhabvala (1994) notes that the SEWA co-ops run by working-class
women are actually among the most successful.
Women’s lack of mobility due to the ideology of seclusion prevalent
among many groups in South Asia also restricts them to some extent,
although there are significant differences between urban and rural women
and between women from the upper classes and poorer women who, as a
matter of necessity, tend to enjoy greater freedom outside the home.
The fact that women pursue their economic activities in a wide and
disparate range of trades, occupations, environments, work locations and
employment relationships comprises a major barrier to effective organizing.
The absence of a fixed employer, or the difficulty of identifying one due to
elaborate chains of subcontracting, is a common characteristic of this sector
and one that ensures that workers remain in precarious casual, contractual,
migrant or home-based work environments. While flexibility in working
hours and in locations of work are perceived as attractive options in the for-
mal sector, for socially vulnerable groups it usually translates into undesir-
able working conditions. Mitter (1994) notes that
For women, flexible work often means greater insecurity, reduction in
working hours and pay, changes in shifts, loss of national insurance ben-
efits, loss of overtime bonuses, and loss of holidays, maternity leave, sick
pay and pension.
SEWA’s protracted battle with the Indian Labour Department to unionize
women in the informal sector in the early 1970s ensued as a result of its
inability to identify a recognizable employer to struggle against. The organ-
ization’s astute argument that unions did not necessarily struggle against
employers, but could serve as unifying platforms for workers, combined
with SEWA’s subsequent sub-sector approach to organizing workers in dif-
ferent trades into co-operatives and lobbying for policy change, have made it
one of the most successful women’s movements in South Asia. Other organ-
izations have dealt with this problem by organizing women around their
common needs for credit, education, legal literacy or training instead of
around their occupations or trades. Once such efforts have financial support
and, in the best cases, policy backing, the base is created upon which more
women can be organized and more demands pushed into broader spheres.
A serious challenge in organizing self-employed women arises from the
flawed assumption that mobilization automatically creates more and better
work. For example, agricultural labourers rendered unemployable for sev-
eral months of the year due to seasonal patterns and vagaries may not benefit

Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004

EARNING THEIR KEEP AND KEEPING WHAT THEY EARN 609

much from traditional unionizing and bargaining practices. Organizing also

cannot boost sales for artisans producing traditional crafts in a declining mar-
ket. Such vulnerabilities point to the usefulness of organizing to help women
gain access to reasonable alternatives. The mix of interventions most likely to
produce optimal results for such groups will be discussed in a later section of
this article.

Organizational weaknesses
There is little point in organizing women for economic empowerment if their
organizing structures are not strong, autonomous and sustainable in the long
term. Women’s organizations in South Asia appear to be faced with three
major weaknesses. Their lack of financial sustainability, or their inability to
achieve self-sufficiency through stable, multiple, interlocking sources of
income and funding, and their inability to survive without external funds
and subsidy is the first of these weaknesses. Managerial weaknesses, char-
acterized by cumbersome bureaucratic structures, administrative difficulties
and inadequate communication between administrators, members and
stakeholders comprise the next major stumbling block. The inability to
develop collaboration and linkages to access markets, governments and the
infrastructural support required for their continued existence comprise the
third most prominent organizational inadequacy. Additionally, organizations
that provide women with credit and other financial services are sometimes
constrained by the limited flexibility of their lending structures and services.
I will briefly address each of these weaknesses.

Financial sustainability
Much evidence from South Asia and around the world supports the view
that organizations that received considerable extended outside assistance,
by and large, have difficulty surviving in the long run (Dichter, 1999;
Narasimhan, 1999; Rutherford, 2000). In contrast, the majority of groups that
start with nothing but their own resources or with a sizeable investment of
their own tend to persist and become self-supporting over time. The chal-
lenge, of course, remains that poor women do not have disposable incomes
to contribute towards organizing efforts and organizations seeking to repre-
sent them must, initially at least, rely upon assistance from domestic and
international governments and other donors.
Once a certain momentum has been generated, several organizations have
been very successful at working towards self-sufficiency by providing paid
services to its members and seeking out productive linkages with private and
public sector enterprises. The crèches run by SEWA, for example, are staffed
by paid members and provide childcare services for a fee to its clients (SEWA,

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004 Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004

610 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

2002). Other organizations like AWARE (Action for Welfare and Awakening
in Rural Environments) a secular, non-political, voluntary organization serv-
ing rural women in over 3000 communities in India organize women by rais-
ing consciousness about their rights and legal entitlements and then step in
with economic programmes and loans that are strictly limited to matching
whatever resources the community is able to mobilize on its own first, and
the kind of economic intervention the community itself wants (Narasimhan,
1999).

Managerial sustainability
Managerial or administrative sustainability has also been identified as a
challenge for many organizations (Cheston and Kuhn, 2002; Dichter, 1999;
Holcombe, 1995). Until women have the necessary exposure to new ideas
and technologies, their desire and ability to assume responsibility are big
constraints to continued operation. They have to struggle to learn adminis-
trative and management skills every time a new problem comes up. The
absence of literate women in their membership has sometimes forced orga-
nizations to depend on volunteers or male community members for day-to-
day management, creating new problems associated with power and access.
The provision of management training and literacy skills, and the services of
younger, highly educated and motivated women have gone a long way
towards addressing administrative issues in many non-governmental organ-
izations (NGOs) and community organizations. It is increasingly evident
that self-employed women possess strong numeric and accounting skills and
learn quickly, as long as the training provided is practical and relevant to
their occupations, life experiences and needs. SEWA, for example, now has
an entire human resource department training programme for women in co-
operatives. It includes training in co-op management, legal issues, functional
literacy, marketing and communications. By including repeated exposure to
new places and new knowledge, it has established a system for women to
learn business and co-operative skills as well as trade skills.

Collaborations
Facilitating and maintaining linkages and extension services with the private
sector and governmental infrastructure is vital for the survival of women’s
organizations but this is, unfortunately, an area that many have not paid
attention to (Carr et al., 1996). Some organizations have attempted to form
collaborations with very positive results. BRAC, for example, has developed
a women-owned poultry programme that is now co-administered by the
Government of Bangladesh and receives valuable inputs (in the form of
chicks and veterinary services) and training from government departments
(Carr et al., 1996; Chen, 1996).

Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004

EARNING THEIR KEEP AND KEEPING WHAT THEY EARN 611

Lending structures
Organizations that provide women with credit face several challenges that
relate to lending structures. The Grameen Bank pioneered the substitution of
physical collateral with social collateral, in the form of peer pressure exerted
on clients by other members of the credit circles who risk losing their lending
privileges as a result of the default of any one of its members. The model has
been declared extremely successful by the Bank and within development
circles because of the very high repayment rates, but it is not without unde-
sirable ramifications. Research conducted by several scholars reveals that, in
the interest of protecting their line of credit and avoiding censure from other
group members, women were occasionally forced to borrow money from the
very moneylenders from whose clutches the Grameen Bank was trying to
extricate them, in order to repay their loans (Goetz and Sengupta, 1996;
Rahman, 1999). Hence, organizing mechanisms that are deemed financially
astute or logical can occasionally have effects that are contradictory to the
original objective of the organizing effort. Other organizations that provide
credit but that are unable to accept deposits or provide savings accounts due
to their NGO status also struggle with the fact that women in many parts of
South Asia need safe, liquid, interest-bearing savings instruments more than
they need credit (Dichter, 1999; Rutherford, 2000). In the absence of secure
places in which to save their money, women all too often turn to traders,
middlemen, husbands and grown-up sons for ‘safe keeping’, with very
negative consequences.

Other factors
There are other factors that organizations with good intentions have in com-
mon that sometimes actually contribute to the maintenance of institutional
barriers that hinder the entry and organization of women. Examples of such
barriers include the following: the limited outreach of NGO programmes and
their concentration in urban areas with high populations; the extremely
bureaucratic and complex structures of governmental programmes that
undo the potential benefits of the greater outreach of broad-based national
programmes; the lack of co-operation and co-ordination between organiz-
ations that promote the role of self-employed women in development in
other useful ways and those that seek to organize them; the lack of clear
definitions of target groups and the absence of trained women to serve as
extension service workers.

Opportunities for organizing self-employed women

While there are still many persistent barriers to organizing women in South
Asia, the opportunities for doing so and the reasons for persevering far

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004 Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004

612 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

outweigh the impediments. In the following pages, I will outline the major
opportunities and motivations for organizing South Asian women for eco-
nomic empowerment.
The continued survival and growth of the informal sector over the
decades, despite predictions about its absorption by large-scale economic
activities, provides the most forceful validation and argument for organizing.
While the proposition that support to large enterprises will produce expan-
sion and create employment for the self-employed displaced by it has been
abundantly contradicted over the decades, it is still not widely understood
that it is, indeed, the smallness and adaptability of the economic activities in
the unorganized sector that ensures its survival, and that more and more
people will in the future be engaging in it to secure livelihoods. The con-
tinued existence of the sector and the sheer number of women who will be
involved in it in South Asia provide perhaps the most basic opportunity and
compelling reason to form collectives.
The economies of scale presented by such large numbers of women
involved in different sectors of the informal economy also provide opportun-
ities for organizing. Poor women have very few financial resources or
assets, but pooling together what they have can have a significant impact.
There are many well-documented cases of women combining their savings as
a means of acquiring credit for productive purposes. NGOs like Proshika and
BRAC in Bangladesh, AWARE in India and the Aga Khan Rural Support Pro-
gramme in Northern Pakistan have organized women to pool their resources
to acquire essential equipment such as tube wells, solar panels and water fil-
ters. In other cases, women have pooled their labour to start nurseries or
catering services, for example; tasks that would have been difficult to under-
take on an individual basis. SEWA has organized 30 all-women production,
service and banking co-operatives in rural and urban areas and has discov-
ered that it can provide a structure for women to come together on the basis
of their work, where they are both the owners and the workers (Bhatt, 1995).
In the male-dominated societies of South Asia, poor women’s collective own-
ership of assets is an important first step towards independent ownership.
Additionally, because such efforts are small and decentralized, they can
develop at each group’s own pace and be responsive to individual experi-
ences, affording women the opportunity to grow into their new roles and
realities. Collectively, many such small organizing efforts can make econom-
ically weak women powerful. While the national memberships of larger
organizations currently run into the millions in South Asia, they are still able
to reach only a small percentage of the women who would benefit from
organizing into co-operatives, unions, credit and savings circles, producer
groups and other collectives. The populous Indian sub-continent offers
numerous additonal possibilities for such initiatives.
The success of well-known organizations of humble beginnings such as
the Grameen Bank, SEWA, Proshika, WWF, BRAC and AWARE with poor,

Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004

EARNING THEIR KEEP AND KEEPING WHAT THEY EARN 613

previously disenfranchised women in both urban and rural environments

in South Asia provides a major impetus for more organizing efforts in the
region. Unorganized workers who previously had no models of organizing
to identify with or to aspire to, now find themselves motivated by the well-
publicized successes of others like themselves. Additionally, the large body
of domestic and international literature that has documented the trials and
tribulations of the early years of these organizations along with their philos-
ophies, organizing strategies and portfolio of activities provides ample
knowledge for aspiring organizations to draw information and support from.
In an unorganized environment, women may be forced to behave in frac-
tious, competitive and dishonest ways to meet their needs, but when they
come together with a common agenda to secure better incomes and working
conditions, there are compelling reasons for camaraderie and mutual sup-
port. Not having their relationships defined by a Pareto equilibrium, where
one person cannot be better off without making another worse off, goes a
long way in dispelling their sense of distrust and resentment towards one
another and motivates them to work towards collective efforts where they all
stand to gain. Also, while workers in the informal economy may be extremely
poor in terms of physical, financial and human capital, out of tradition and
necessity they tend to generate strong social capital by maintaining local net-
works of aid among family and friends, which are very conducive to organ-
izing. While unionizing strategies have enabled women to come together to
co-operate rather than compete with one another for jobs and to use their
increased bargaining power in their favour, it is sometimes possible to
achieve some of the same results as a group, even without being formally re-
gistered as a union. There are several examples of ununionized collectives of
women embroiderers in Bangladesh and garment workers in India who are
having their demands met by refusing collectively to work below a certain
piece rate.
Organizing women into collectives not only increases their economic clout
and bargaining power but also opens up other opportunities for change. Fre-
quently, women’s organizations have enabled women to gain increased
access to new markets or to negotiate better terms in old arrangements.
Handicraft and clothing co-operatives organized by Banaskantha in Gujarat,
India, helped women organize to bypass exploitative middlemen and to
access urban garment markets, thereby increasing their earnings by over
300 per cent (Carr et al., 1996). Similarly, vegetable vendors and milk co-
operatives were able to negotiate contracts to deliver produce and dairy
products to public sector hotels and hospitals. Even rag pickers, traditionally
considered the most downtrodden and powerless members of the informal
sector, were able to organize under SEWA’s guidance to negotiate contracts
with government services to be the preferred recipients of the state’s waste
paper, which members then constructed into paper bags for sale (Rose, 1992).
Similarly, potato-farmer groups in remote parts of northern Pakistan and

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004 Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004

614 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

basket weavers in Sri Lanka were able to access export markets through their
involvement with the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme and the Women’s
Development Federation respectively (Carr et al., 1996).
Once an organization has created a unifying platform for its members and
put its finances in order, other objectives can be added to the initial agenda.
Women’s organizations have not only effectively provided work insurance
and basic social security services like maternity, healthcare and childcare on
a premium or user-fee basis but, through their lobbying activities, they have
also won significant policy victories over governments and labour associ-
ations. The most prominent examples include the struggle of the women in
the informal sector in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu to bring the Construc-
tion Workers Act into existence, and the change of policies in Gujarat to pro-
vide healthcare and maternity benefits to tobacco workers (Carr et al., 1996;
WWF, 2000).
Providing low-cost housing for families and hostels for low-income
women is another service in which a few organizations have made a dif-
ference. Organizations like the Nari Udyog Kendra in Bangladesh, which
provides safe, affordable housing for single women working in garment
factories and also lobbies for better and more affordable transportation for
working women, provide very valuable services in support of women’s eco-
nomic empowerment (Nari Udyog Kendra, 2000). Of course, such initiatives
create the inevitable debate of how much energy should be expended by
organizations in developing responsive parallel models through the women
themselves, and in demanding appropriate responses from the public and
private sector. Nevertheless, I believe they provide organizations with
unique learning opportunities to test their ability to deliver such services and
to identify useful linkages and collaborations with the other two sectors.
Finally, from a more personal but crucial perspective, organizing promises
women a source of affiliation and identity beyond those offered by family
and traditional kinship structures. This is especially important for women
who have worked all their lives but have never perceived themselves as
workers with rights, entitlements and demands. Organizing offers women
the opportunity to explore their potential and abilities as workers and as
agents of change. Organized women are much more likely to lose their fear
and pessimism and to gain confidence in the process of coming together in
solidarity and sisterhood. As a group, they develop the potential to fight
exploitation, not just at work but also at home and in society in general. They
are able to establish relationships of mutual respect with employers and with
more advantaged sections of society who, perhaps for the first time, perceive
them as a force of their own instead of as isolated, vulnerable, powerless
women. In meetings, unionized textile workers in Ahmedabad now pull up
chairs across the table from employers instead of sitting at their feet with
their heads covered as they have done for decades; rural Bangladeshi women
from community organizations have abandoned purdah against the wishes

Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004

EARNING THEIR KEEP AND KEEPING WHAT THEY EARN 615

of village elders to protest against the illegal felling of trees; Grameen Bank
members are now frequently found on village and community-level boards;
Proshika members have successfully resisted the eviction efforts of slumlords
and local gangs in Dhaka, and police in Gujarat, previously infamous for
their brutality towards peddlers, now meekly accept SEWA membership
cards and vending licenses from street vendors.
These, and many other examples, bear testimony to what organizing has
accomplished for millions of women in South Asia and also provide a sense
of what is possible in the foreseeable future. In the following pages I will
attempt to categorize and critique the specific economic empowerment strat-
egies that have enjoyed the most widespread support and replication.

Categorization of economic empowerment strategies

While there is some variety in the organizing principles, short-term goals and
methods of operation pursued by different groups, they seem to have a num-
ber of long-term goals in common. These include, but are not limited to:
increasing income and assets; providing or generating demand for work
security and social security services such as health, childcare, housing, and
access to developmental services such as training, communications and
banking; building solidarity and support networks; strengthening demo-
cracy and democratic processes; mainstreaming self-employed women into
the national economy and encouraging and enabling them to become part-
ners and facilitators in the process of economic development.
These objectives, in turn, appear to be pursued by one or a combination of
several of the following specific economic strategies: financial interventions,
including credit, savings accounts and investment instruments; enterprise
development, including increased access to skills, management training,
technologies and production packages; information and marketing strat-
egies; unionizing and bargaining for higher wages, better working condi-
tions and work security for self-employed as well as waged employees and
consciousness-raising socio-political strategies.

Financial interventions
Other than a few organizations that make political goals like legal literacy
and voter education their sole agenda, almost all women’s organizations in
South Asia have a strong financial component. Micro-credit is easily the most
popular financial intervention. The Grameen Bank has to date disbursed
more than US$2.5 billion (Yunus, 1999). SEWA Bank, the largest co-operative
under the umbrella organization, currently has 125,000 self-employed
women depositors and has disbursed more than US$10 million in loans
(SEWA, 2002). Even organizations that were not originally motivated to

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004 Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004

616 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

become financial institutions have accumulated and disbursed considerable

amounts of savings and loans: by 1995, BRAC and Proshika had disbursed
US$180 million and US$13 million respectively in loans to women members
(Carr et al., 1996).
Issues of financial sustainability have plagued even the most successful
micro-credit programmes. From the beginning, most organizations, includ-
ing pioneers like the Grameen Bank, have been dependent on funds from
donor countries, large multilateral and bilateral organizations such as the
World Bank and USAID, and sometimes even from the larger NGOs. Despite
impressive repayment rates in excess of 90 per cent in South Asia, the small
sizes of these loans, averaging about US$94, and the associated costs of
lending such small amounts, render organizations ineffective at weaning
themselves off donor funding (Dichter, 1999). This has motivated many
organizations to become banks in order to create alternate sources of income
through savings accounts and investment instruments such as mutual funds
and guaranteed investment certificates. While this coincides very well with
the demonstrated widespread and greater need for savings than for credit
among women in the region, many organizations have resisted it, on the
ideological grounds of wanting to remain social, rather than financial, insti-
tutions. Some have explored alternatives to deal with the issue of financial
sustainability by organizing members into self-regulating rotating savings
and credit circles (ROSCAs) or by ‘graduating’ their clients to banks after
allowing them initial access to credit and the opportunity to establish sound
credit ratings with some success. Organizations like the Nari Nidhi, a credit
fund for poor women in the Indian state of Bihar, have an explicit long-term
objective of facilitating direct linkages between groups of poor women and
formal banking institutions (Remenyi and Quinones, 2000).
While achieving financial sustainability and providing women with sav-
ings instruments are both very worthy goals, I believe that organizations in
South Asia should persevere to find innovative solutions other than the most
intuitive one of becoming full-fledged banks. Mobilizing savings and pro-
viding credit are not the same things. Lending money to poor clients without
taking collateral puts the risk of default on the side of the NGO, while taking
deposits may actually mean transferring the risk of poor banking practices or
bankruptcy to the poor. This scenario would be detrimental, if not disastrous,
for both the clients and the NGO, unless it can obtain technical assistance
from governments or donor agencies in the development of deposit insur-
ance programmes.
Despite such limitations, it is difficult to ignore the fact that to be respon-
sive to the needs of the poor, savings must move into a more prominent posi-
tion. Some NGOs have figured out innovative ways to meet this need. The
Co-Operative Development Fund (CDF) in Andhra Pradesh, India is a small
NGO that reaches 25,000 clients indirectly through the farmers’ co-operatives
that it assists. The co-operatives focus on organizing and empowering

Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004

EARNING THEIR KEEP AND KEEPING WHAT THEY EARN 617

women through ‘thrift’, in the form of savings, and credit groups (Carr et al.,
1996). The ultimate goal of CDF’s work is the self-sufficiency of the co-
operatives and the organization currently takes almost no donor money. CDF
is also involved in co-operative advocacy both within and beyond its home
state. It was recently engaged in a major effort to change co-operative law
both at state and central government levels. The primary purpose was to free
the co-op sector from excessive government control and interference and to
make the laws relating to co-ops enabling, rather than controlling, instru-
ments. An act to this effect was created in response to CDF’s advocacy and it
has restored member control of co-operatives and allowed informal organ-
izations, such as CDF’s thrift and credit groups, to register as formal co-ops.
The NGO hopes that other groups outside the CDF umbrella will ultimately
follow their example to register a state-level federation of women’s thrift
co-ops.
In general, co-operative movements have been important for the self-
employed because they serve the dual purpose of struggling for better work-
ing conditions and developing alternative economic systems by allowing the
workers themselves to control their means of production in an environment
where there are no employers and employees in the conservative sense, but
where they all own what they produce. Co-operatives are powerful economic
interventions, especially when combined with a formal or informal unioniz-
ing component. If the co-operative is in the same trade and among the same
set of workers as the union, the co-op can set a standard and provide a model
of higher wages and earnings. This allows the union to demonstrate to the
employers or traders that a higher wage or better working terms are possible
and affordable. It also provides workers with a bargaining and lobbying tool
for policy change. SEWA has used these strategies extensively with its vari-
ous co-ops and its current national membership stands at close to half a mil-
lion women (SEWA, 2002). Co-operatives also make good business sense in
South Asia, because they are entitled to financial and policy support from
governments. Weavers’ co-ops, for example, qualify for equipment subsidies,
loans and certain quotas of raw materials, for rebates to customers on
finished goods and for administrative support for the initial years of the
co-operatives’ operation.
Access to finances is usually a necessary condition for women’s involve-
ment in economic activities but it is rarely a sufficient one. Women face other
constraints such as the saturation of markets, competition, the inability to dif-
ferentiate one’s product from those sold by competitors, the lack of informa-
tion and pricing uncertainties arising from credit’s widespread assumption
that the poor, who are engaged in some kind of economic activity, already
know what they need to know about business and lack only capital. In reality,
this is not always the case for all sections of the poor, and those who started
out from relatively stronger positions are also generally those who are
most likely to benefit from access to credit. While most borrowers are usually

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004 Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004

618 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

rational and respond to market forces in the manner that they deem most
appropriate, many are often not fully informed about the consequences and
repercussions of their actions, or those of the networks and institutions
through which they operate. Such limitations have motivated many organi-
zations to explore enterprise development through the provision of training
and technologies as a platform for organizing women.

Enterprise development
Many organizations in South Asia have taken on the responsibility of pro-
viding poor people with the information and skills to choose viable activities
and occupations and to access the necessary backward and forward linkages,
including the care and maintenance of their assets, raw materials supplies,
markets and insurance. Some of these initiatives are very innovative and sen-
sitive to women’s particular needs. For example, the Aga Khan Rural Sup-
port Programme (AKRSP) in Northern Pakistan provides both subsistence
and graduated packages so that women can start off by improving their exist-
ing subsistence-level household activities and graduate on to commercial
production (Carr et al., 1996). After experiencing difficulty with collective
production packages, the NGO adapted its programme to women’s prefer-
ences by introducing individual packages.
Furthermore, the AKRSP adopted the dynamic strategy of training women
from the communities to provide advice, guidance, training and inputs to
other women as ‘master trainers’. This is especially important and useful in
remote areas and where seclusion norms of purdah are prevalent, limiting
women’s mobility and their contact with men. AWARE uses a similar strat-
egy to train community leaders who, in turn, not only share their awareness
and mobilize other women in their communities but also prepare others as
leaders in their own right (Narasimhan, 1999). I have commented upon
SEWA and BRAC’s imaginative enterprise development activities several
times in this article. Both organizations are moving from credit and service
delivery towards integrated development packages for women due to their
wide range of well-developed sub-sector programmes and productive col-
laborations. SEWA has organized skill training for its members through
numerous channels: government extension, the Labour Department, volun-
tary agencies, vocational schools, village council training institutes, univer-
sities, industrial boards, co-op unions, handicraft boards, and their own
skilled artisans (SEWA, 2002).
Self-employed women generally have very specific needs for training that
have to relate directly to their daily problems of work and survival. This
explains why the skills training provided by organizations like SEWA and
BRAC are more popular than standard literacy programmes. Women also
have to be compensated financially during training for the work they are
missing, or they may not be able to afford to attend. Since most women who

Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004

EARNING THEIR KEEP AND KEEPING WHAT THEY EARN 619

undergo training are not literate, the development of interesting training

tools like audio-visual media is important.
In addition to training, some organizations also directly provide jobs. The
BRAC handloom and embroidery production centres, for instance, directly
employ over 2000 women and provide attractive working conditions in a safe
and non-exploitative environment (Carr et al., 1996). Other organizations cre-
ate jobs for women by training them to provide services to other women in
their communities. These include the ‘paraprofessionals’ in a variety of
organizations: barefoot accountants and master trainers in AKRSP; barefoot
doctors, teachers, lawyers and vets in AWARE and BRAC. Although it is the
community receiving the service that pays the wages of these workers, it is
the NGO that trains and prepares them to take on these responsibilities.
It has been argued in the context of both government and non-government
programmes that credit may not be an appropriate intervention for the very
poorest, whose raw labour is the only asset at their disposal (Kabeer, 1996).
This is the group that is fearful of institutions and of being indebted, and they
are likely to lack the necessary resources to transform loans into viable eco-
nomic activities. For some within this group, programmes of employment
generation are likely to have a greater potential to meet their needs. Employ-
ment schemes linked to enterprise development infrastructure may help to
make credit interventions more useful for a wider section of the poorest
people, and organizations experienced in grassroots mobilization can be
effective in bringing people who currently do not have the skills and knowl-
edge to use credit effectively into the entrepreneurship fold. They can also
play a variety of very important roles, including preparing people to become
good borrowers and savers, helping people to manage their own finances
or their financial groups, and enabling people to put the social and cultural
capital they have to better use. While such activities are less likely to be
financially sustainable than other interventions, I believe they are worth
exploring because of the sheer number of people who lack the opportunity
to learn about self-employment and currently live in poverty due to their
dependence on seasonal or other forms of precarious employment.

Market strategies
Programmes that promote women’s self-employment often tend to give
inadequate attention to market trends and to the marketability of the prod-
ucts. Market constraints are usually of two types. There may be no real
demand for the product because the market is saturated. Alternately, there
may be a demand for the product but poor entrepreneurs may not be able to
sell it, because of inadequate access to markets or lack of information about
where the markets are.
Several organizations in South Asia have attempted to find solutions
to these problems. In the case of flooded markets, BRAC, AKRSP and

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004 Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004

620 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

Proshika have assisted women in shifting from traditional activities, which

have few or no barriers to entry, into non-traditional activities which
demand improved technical skills and increased amounts of capital, but
provide higher returns due to greater market demand. Sericulture, tailor-
ing, carpentry, auto-repair, weaving and brickmaking are a few examples
(Carr et al., 1996). In many cases, larger organizations have the capacity for
internal technology development, which is used to provide appropriate
technologies to help diversify and upgrade the range of enterprises open to
women. Some have also developed effective strategies to deal with market
information and access. The Women’s Development Fund in Sri Lanka has
established a market information service that its members can use to find
and connect with potential buyers (Carr et al., 1996). The AKRSP has linked
its women’s organizations with merchant marketing co-operatives and
truck drivers to facilitate timely access to markets for their perishable food
products. The marketing strategies of the SEWA co-operatives are so suc-
cessful that the organization now runs training sessions for other smaller
co-operatives.

Unionizing
The benefits of unionizing and collective bargaining have been outlined in
other parts of the article. A few of the disadvantages have as well. The most
successful unionizing processes take place at three different levels. At the
grassroots level, women unionize to struggle against their direct exploiters
like contractors or extorting policemen; at the next level, they struggle
against an ineffective or indifferent labour enforcement bureaucracy and
legal system and at the third level, against unfavourable or absent national or
international laws and policies. While this process may seem incremental or
linear, organizations that use unionizing principles like SEWA and WWF are
quick to point out that, in reality, the union inevitably finds itself struggling
concurrently not just against individual contractors or manufacturers but
also against the policies of an industry or trade as a whole.
While several unions have been effective at bringing public visibility to the
exploitation of women and pushing for policy change, it is important to stress
that conventional union-style work can be unsuccessful and even damaging
in some circumstances. A prominent case is that of rural agricultural work,
where women outnumber men but where rigid caste, feudal and gender hier-
archies combined with the sheer lack of other employment opportunities ren-
der them extremely vulnerable to exploitation. Women face problems of low
wages, the non-payment of wages and extremely long hours during trans-
planting and harvesting seasons, followed by the uncertainty of work for the
remaining eight months of the year. While employers may verbally agree to
pay minimum wages upon demand, SEWA organizers found that it was easy
for them to terrorize women and hire, or threaten to hire, outside labour.

Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004

EARNING THEIR KEEP AND KEEPING WHAT THEY EARN 621

While this situation presents itself frequently even in urban environments,

it is especially damaging in rural environments where agriculture is the
mainstay and where there are many more willing workers than jobs. A good
strategy for rural areas may be to enhance combinations of agriculture, ar-
tisan, livestock and ecological regeneration occupations, combined with links
to credit and appropriate technology. Large numbers of skilled artisans who
fall into agricultural or manual labour due to losing the means of production
or their inability to afford raw materials, could benefit from such a strategy.
In addition to rural weavers, SEWA has successfully tried this approach
with urban tailors, displaced artisans, dairy producers and processed food
vendors.
One of the biggest contributions of the women’s union movement in South
Asia appears to be the empowerment of poor women by induction into the
legal process, since exclusion from the legal system is one of the ways that
society maintains its codes and strata. The significant legal victory won by
street vendors, for example, in the recognition by the Supreme Court of India
of their right to vend and to a just licensing policy as a fundamental human
right under the Constitution of India, have afforded women in the informal
economy the first taste of what it is like to have the force of law and the qual-
ities of an organized society working for them. While the continuum between
employment and social services have always been evident to the women
workers themselves, the unionizing and bargaining struggles have contrib-
uted significantly towards demonstrating the link between the two and dis-
pelling the long-held myth that they are separate issues. The victories won by
construction-worker and tobacco-worker collectives in securing basic social
security services from their employers are good examples. In addition to put-
ting pressure on the state to change planning decisions, financial institutions
and laws, unions also act as effective watchdogs, ensuring that the existing
machinery actually works for poor and underprivileged women.
It is important to stress that there is no simple one-size-fits-all unionizing
formula to follow, given that agricultural, industrial and other sectors in the
regions of South Asia are growing at widely varying rates. Different regions,
states and occupations have to work out their own strategies for employment
maximization and collective bargaining, with the understanding and con-
fidence that women can organize, plan, pressure and act together almost
anywhere.

Social and political strategies

The interventions described previously perceive women’s economic
empowerment as an entry point for their overall empowerment within the
family and within larger social and political spheres. While the logic behind
this appears sound, it has also been demonstrated that there is a need in South

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004 Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004

622 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

Asia to address other socio-political sources of women’s disempowerment

and subordination. Women’s organizations have pursued different strategies
to address such constraints. I have described AWARE’s strategy of conscien-
tization followed by economic support in a previous section. Although the
strategy begins with motivation and then moves on to economic develop-
ment, there is also a third stage, which is seen as an equally important com-
ponent of the organization’s strategy: that of withdrawing from a community
once a self-sustaining momentum for initiating change has been generated.
Avoiding a dependency syndrome is a major aspect of the AWARE strat-
egy. The first batch of 150 villages became ‘independent’ in 1985 and the sec-
ond in 1987. The organization has so far withdrawn in this manner from 2620
villages across India where the community has been empowered with the
confidence and the ability to tackle problems on its own (Narasimhan, 1999).
The fact that AWARE is able to withdraw from a village once awareness has
been generated in sufficient measure itself shows that it is not so much the
material input that is the decisive factor in an appropriate strategy, as the psy-
chological priming for community empowerment. Although the measure-
ment of empowerment continues to be a debated topic, a number of studies
based on participant observation and interviews have revealed that women
who have been exposed to the awareness-generation strategy fare signific-
antly better than women who have not (Carr et al., 1996; Kabeer, 1997; Razavi,
1999). This includes the most widely accepted areas of empowerment such as
income, education, healthcare, status, access to and ownership of assets and
resources and autonomy and assertiveness.
The emphasis on psychological empowerment, rather than on immediate
income generation, differentiates the AWARE strategy from other conven-
tional approaches. The sense of solidarity and camaraderie generated among
the women has also enabled them to seek solutions to domestic and social
issues in the community. Emphasizing psychological empowerment, aware-
ness generation, information sharing and motivation, and bolstering this
with modest economic assistance, appears to effect changes that other inter-
ventions cannot bring about by themselves. Nijera Kori, an NGO founded by
development activists in Bangladesh who were previously part of BRAC,
does not distribute material resources to poor women but seeks instead to
build their organizational capacity to enable them to press claims on public
institutions (Kabeer, 1994). The NGO reasons that while there is state com-
mitment to providing various material resources to the poor, from the redis-
tribution of unclaimed, publicly owned land to the provision of employment
through government work schemes, what prevents disenfranchised people
from claiming their just entitlement is their lack of political clout.
In terms of economic resources, priority is given to the mobilization of the
communities’ own resources and includes joint cultivation (that is, cultiva-
tion on plots that are co-operatively leased or owned) and aquaculture,
supported by group savings. The Women’s Development Programme in

Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004

EARNING THEIR KEEP AND KEEPING WHAT THEY EARN 623

Rajasthan, India, also focuses less on putting new mechanisms of delivery in

place and more on building alliances and networks that would enable poorer
rural women to put collective pressure on unresponsive local institutions
(Kabeer, 1994). Both organizations report that women in their projects went
on to bond together to fight domestic violence, child marriages, the dowry
and the ostracism of widows. They also took a lead in community initiatives
for developmental work in water supply, agriculture and healthcare.
A major set of socio-political constraints arise from patriarchal land rights
and property laws that deny, or allow for smaller shares of land and property
to daughters, wives and widows. Many organizations have lobbied consist-
ently for changes in the property law or for the implementation of constitu-
tional amendments but SEWA, for example, continues to identify getting
land registered in women’s names as one of its major current challenges
(Jhabvala, 2002, private communication). When women in the Indian state of
Andhra Pradesh discovered that they could not join co-operatives because of
their lack of land rights, CDF worked around the issue by setting up special
thrift and credit societies that had no such requirements. While its possible
for well-intentioned organizations to figure out such loopholes, the challenge
remains that unless institutionalized forms of discrimination against women
are eliminated, opportunities offered in lieu of such rights may merely be
prolonging the status quo.
Deeply entrenched social and religious mores and customs make it espe-
cially difficult to challenge such practices, since women themselves may
acquiesce or openly support them out of fear of losing social approval or
angering men in their families and communities. The regional experiences of
different organizations in South Asia suggest that it is better to bring men
into the discussions and debates instead of marginalizing and antagonizing
them. By boosting women’s incomes through group activities and concur-
rently educating men about the importance of women’s asset ownership in a
non-threatening environment, organizations like the AKRSP, CDF and SEWA
have managed to secure property-sharing, land and housing titles for women
in a significant number of cases (Gujarat Mahila Housing SEWA Trust, 2001;
Mehta, 1996; Unni, 1999).

Conclusion
The primary objective of this article was to explore the major challenges and
opportunities of organizing women in the informal economy in South Asia.
The most prominent factors that impede the ability of South Asian women to
organize were identified as follows: women’s weak starting positions and
their lack of bargaining power, borne out a pervasive sense of fear and help-
lessness; the strong opposition and even violent repression from those
factions most likely to lose power as a result of women’s solidarity; their

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004 Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004

624 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

organizational weaknesses of financial and managerial instability; their

inability to form productive linkages and collaborations with the public and
private sector; the controversial lending structures of credit organizations
where physical collateral is substituted with peer pressure tactics that are
sometimes oppressive and counterproductive; the limited outreach of NGOs;
the tedious bureaucratic structures of government programmes; the lack of a
clear definition of target groups and the shortage of trained extension work-
ers. The survival and growth of the informal sector, despite predictions of
its demise in the face of rapid industrialization, was identified as the most
basic and compelling reason for the organization and mobilization of self-
employed women. Other opportunities were identified as follows: the poten-
tial of combining resources for the group ownership of the assets and means
of production; the creation of a forum in which women can co-operate rather
than compete for jobs; accessing new markets, associations and subsidies; the
potential to demand work insurance and social protection and the inspiration
and support of new sources of affiliation and solidarity.
The final section of the article provided a categorization and a critical ana-
lysis of the most widely known strategies aimed at organizing self-employed
women in South Asia. Financial interventions, including credit, savings
accounts and investment instruments were easily the most popular although
the organizations providing them continued to struggle with issues of finan-
cial viability, outreach and the moral dilemma of whether to remain social
institutions or to convert to banks in the interest of sustainability.
Although some organizations have introduced innovative strategies and
tools to perpetuate themselves and to serve their constituencies better, a thor-
ough study of such programmes points to the need for more imaginative and
proactive financial interventions. Enterprise development is one of the strat-
egies that grew out of the failure of credit to ensure the success of women’s
economic activities. Several organizations have developed participatory
approaches and packages that start where the women themselves are, and
with their own priorities in mind. They focus primarily on bringing women
into the economic mainstream by broadening their options and thereby
increasing their likelihood of success and reducing their dependence on out-
side sources of support.
There has also been a trend toward creating employment opportunities for
women by training them to provide important services to other women. The
master trainers of the AKRSP, the barefoot doctors, vets and lawyers of
BRAC, the literacy workers of Proshika and the health and childcare pro-
viders of SEWA are very good examples. The numbers of organizations
working on market strategies to promote women’s enterprises have also
grown significantly in recent years. While some have very successfully found
solutions to the problems of the declining demand of some products, as well
as the market saturation of others, there is ample room for the induction
of women into more non-traditional but lucrative enterprises. Unionizing

Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004

EARNING THEIR KEEP AND KEEPING WHAT THEY EARN 625

strategies have enjoyed much success in parts of South Asia and limited suc-
cess in others.
The least successful efforts were generally in areas where low wages and
working conditions were the result of sheer lack of employment opportun-
ities. In such cases, the joint strategy of unionization and formation of co-
operatives or other reasonable alternatives is especially effective. In addition
to raising the visibility of informal sector workers, the biggest contributions
of the women’s unions in South Asia were the successful induction of women
into the legal and labour machinery of states and countries; the demonstra-
tion of the link between employment and social services and successful
lobbying to influence policy and regulation at the grassroots, national and
international levels.
Many organizations have stressed the importance of social and political
strategies to help women rise out of their subordinated positions in the fam-
ily and society. In some cases they have demonstrated that psychological
priming is more important, or at least as important, as material input for
women’s overall empowerment. Overcoming deeply rooted male biases in
land and property rights stands out as one of the most pressing priorities for
such organizations, together with calls for advocacy activities that demand
the formulation and implementation of policies at the national level that spe-
cifically accommodate the needs of women in the informal sector and recog-
nize their role and rights as primary agents in land and landed property
ownership.

References

Bhatt, E. (1995) Women and development alternatives: micro-and small-scale enter-

prises in India. In Dignard, L. and Havet, J. (eds) Women in Micro- and Small-Scale
Enterprise Development, pp. 85–100. London: Intermediate Technology Publications.
Carr, M., Chen, M. and Jhabvala, R. (1996) Speaking Out: Women’s Economic Empower-
ment in South Asia. London: Intermediate Technology Publications.
Chen, M. (ed.) (1996) Beyond Credit: A Subsector Approach to Promoting Women’s
Enterprises. Ottawa: Aga Khan Foundation.
Cheston, S. and Kuhn, L. (2002) Empowering Women through Microfinance. New York:
UNIFEM.
Dichter, T. (1999) Non-Governmental Organizations in Microfinance: Past, Present and
Future. Washington, DC: World Bank.
Dignard, L. and Havet, J. (eds) (1995) Women in Micro- and Small-Scale Enterprise Devel-
opment. London: Intermediate Technology Publications.
Goetz, Anne Marie and Sengupta, R. (1996) Who takes the credit? gender, power, and
control over loan use in rural credit programs in Bangladesh. World Development,
24,1, 45–63.
Gujarat Mahila Housing (MHT) SEWA Trust (2001) A Framework for Sustainable
Improvements in the Living Conditions of Poor Women ‘Sahbhagi Yojana’. Ahmedabad:
MHT.

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004 Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004

626 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

Holcombe, S. (1995) Managing to Empower: The Grameen Bank’s Experience of Poverty

Alleviation. Dhaka: University Press Limited.
Jhabvala, R. (1994) Self-employed women’s association: organizing women by strug-
gle and development. In Rowbotham, S. and Mitter, S. (eds) Dignity and Daily
Bread: New Forms of Economic Organizing among Poor Women in the Third World and
the First, pp. 114–38. London: Routledge.
Jhabvala, R. and Subrahmanya, R.K.A. (eds) (2000) The Unorganized Sector: Work
Security and Social Protection. New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Kabeer, N. (1994) Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought. New
York: Verso.
Kabeer, N. (1996) Compensating for Institutional Exclusion?: Lessons from Indian Govern-
ment and Non-Government Credit Interventions for the Poor. Sussex: Institute of Devel-
opment Studies.
Kabeer, N. (1997) Women, wages and intrahousehold power relations in urban
Bangladesh. Development and Change, 28,2, 261–302.
Mehta, Trupti (1996) Women’s access to urban land: SEWA experience. Based on the
presentation at the Third International Training Workshop on Urban Development
through the Land Market: the Bangkok Experience and its Lessons in Bangkok,
August 1996.
Mitter, S. (1994) On organizing women in casualised work: a global overview. In
Rowbotham, S. and Mitter, S. (eds) Dignity and Daily Bread: New Forms of Economic
Organizing Among Poor Women in the Third World and the First, pp. 14–52. London:
Routledge.
Narasimhan, S. (1999) Empowering Women: An Alternative Strategy from Rural India.
New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Nari Udyog Kendra (2000) Study on gender dimension in Dhaka Urban Transport
Project. Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Rahman, A. (1999) Women and Microcredit in Rural Bangladesh: Anthropological Study of
the Rhetoric and Realities of Grameen Bank Lending. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Razavi, S. (1999) Export-oriented employment, poverty and gender: contested
accounts. Development and Change, 30,3, 653–83.
Remenyi, J. and Quinones, B. (eds) (2000) Microfinance and Poverty Alleviation: Case
Studies From Asia and the Pacific. New York: Pinter.
Rose, K. (1992) Where Women are Leaders: The SEWA Movement in India. London and
New Jersey: Zed Books.
Rutherford, S. (2000) The Poor and Their Money. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
SEWA (2002) Available online at www.sewa.org. Last consulted 29 April 2002.
Unni, Jeemol (1999) Property rights for women: case for joint titles to agricultural land
and urban housing. Economic and Political Weekly, 34,21, May 22, 1999.
Working Women’s Forum (WWF) (2000) Social Platform Through Social Innovations: a
Coalition with Women in the Informal Sector. Chennai, India: Working Women’s
Forum.
Yunus, M. (1999) Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty.
New York: Public Affairs.

Volume 11 Number 6 November 2004 © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004