I spent the third week of my Leadership in Action project working with SEWA Kerala, the Self-Employed Women’s Association. SEWA is both a union for women engaged in informal work, using collective power to lobby governments for the recognition of informal work; and a facilitator for women’s training and employment, teaching women both new skills and how they can be used to earn an income.

SEWA operates in several fields of self-employment: domestic work, traditional craft and agriculture. In addition, SEWA runs a chain of cafes and canteens called SEWA Livelihood, where members of the association work. In India, unlike the UK, the majority of work is informal, meaning there is no regular employer or payment and thus a historic lack of legal protection and security. Furthermore, women more commonly engage in informal work because it allows them the flexibility required to take care of their families.

We stayed at SEWA’s rural centre, giving us the perfect opportunity to get closer to nature and completely focus on our work with SEWA. On Monday, we met with the association’s leadership, learning about their mission and the challenges they are facing, as well as their organisational structure and the breadth of their work. I was surprised to learn about all the different ways they supported their members, both on a financial levels, providing fair pay and saving schemes, and on the personal level, meeting regularly with retired members of SEWA.

On Tuesday, we visited their reed-craft clusters: groups of women who are supported by SEWA to produce traditional crafts. Many of the women worked at the same time as taking care of their children – and still took the time to talk to us about the changes SEWA had made to the production process, sourcing reeds at a fair price.

On Wednesday, we visited the SEWA Livelihood cafes where we got to try some delicious food in a welcoming atmosphere. This week, my responsibility was observing SEWA Kerala’s operations and recognising inefficiencies. I used my time at the cafes to observe their processes and ask as many questions as I could think of. Though my role was to detect any problems, the cafes were very well organised, so it was a challenge to find inefficiencies – and equally hard to resolve them, since any solutions had to be both people-friendly and low-cost. One observation I am particularly proud of is recognising the difficulty some workers were having transporting food between the kitchen and dining area (the canteen had recently expanded). My recommendation to solve this issue, investing in a trolley to transport food at peak times, was well-received by SEWA and will hopefully be implemented soon.

Finally, on Friday, we had the opportunity to meet and present our observations to Nalini Nayak, the woman who founded SEWA Kerala. It was humbling to hear her story, and her experience-backed explanations helped further my understanding between feminism and fair employment. Hearing about her decades of experience in the field made me realise I had so much more to learn.