On December 8 in Ahmedabad, SEWA Self Employed Women’s Association to explore trade linkages with five African nations including South Africa, Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal and Tanzania – under the aegis of its 6 year long ‘SETU Africa programmes’ to help strengthen their women cooperatives.
A delegation of 15 Tanzanian Trade union team, Self Help Group (SHG) and NGO coordinators visits Ahmedabad to study SEWA’s organising of informal workers. They will implement the same into their own Membership-Based Organisations (MBO) like unions and cooperatives.
From SEWA Namrata Bali, SEWA Director, Mirai Chatterjee, chairperson of VimoSEWA and Laltita Krishnaswami were present at the function.
Mirai Chatterjee said, “We want to encourage women-to-women trade linkages that could benefit the primary producer, but currently there are high trade barriers in terms of high custom duties. We have written a note to the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and asked the Indian government to help mitigate the challenges posed by high tariffs and facilitate trade between primary producers which are women in this case. A few of SEWA’s best practices that these African woman leaders hope to replicate include our board structure existing in sister organisations, our Bal Seva Kendras model and how to strengthen cooperatives. We hope this programme will benefit about 1,00,000 women who are part of these cooperatives in the African nations.”
The Tanzanian delegation along with a 3 member team from Mozambique are in Ahmedabad to learn about how to organize women workers at the grassroot level and help them build their own sustainable MBOs through an integrated approach.
