How SEWA Supports Women Through Natural Disasters

When drought grips Gujarat’s arid plains or floodwaters sweep through its villages, the women who live there face a double burden. They bear the immediate physical consequences – no water, no crops, no income – while also shouldering the domestic labor that disasters multiply overnight. For over five decades, the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a trade union of women in India’s informal economy, has refused to treat these women as passive victims. Instead, SEWA has built a model of disaster response that centers women as leaders, workers, and decision-makers – with results that governments and international aid agencies are still working to replicate.

Understanding SEWA’s approach to disaster 🔗

Founded in 1972 by Ela Bhatt in Ahmedabad, SEWA began as the women’s wing of a textile labor union. It grew into one of the world’s largest organizations of informal women workers, now representing over 2.1 million women across 18 Indian states. Its membership includes salt-pan workers, craft artisans, construction laborers, street vendors, and agricultural workers – all women whose livelihoods are deeply exposed to weather and climate.

Western Gujarat, where SEWA does much of its rural work, has been battered by repeated disasters. Rains failed in 1985, 1987, 1992, and 1995. The floods of 1997 were followed by cyclones in 1998 and 1999, and the drought of 2000 was the worst rain failure the region had seen in a decade. What SEWA recognized – and what distinguishes it from conventional aid organizations – is that for poor women, disaster is not an exceptional event. It is a recurring condition of life. As Ela Bhatt put it plainly: “For poor women, crisis is always there.”

This recognition fundamentally shapes how SEWA responds. Rather than arriving after a disaster to distribute supplies and leave, SEWA builds systems before, during, and after crises – with poor women themselves doing the planning and the work.

Drought-proofing through employment creation 🔗

When drought strikes, the first casualty for rural women is their income. Agriculture collapses. Livestock weaken. Men migrate to cities to find work, leaving women behind to manage households with fewer resources and more responsibilities. Many areas where SEWA works in Gujarat are dry, drought-prone, even desert areas, where there is lack of employment, very low wages, poor health, crushing debts, and high rates of migration, especially among men.

SEWA’s response to this pattern is not to wait for drought to arrive and then react. It is to build economic buffers in advance – and to activate them immediately when drought conditions set in.

Craft activity as drought relief 🔗

One of SEWA’s most effective drought interventions is the promotion of craft-based employment. Gujarat, particularly the Patan and Kutch districts, has a rich tradition of embroidery and textile work. Successive droughts and irregular rainfall had begun to force rural communities to migrate, threatening their highly unique traditional embroidery skills. SEWA stepped in to reverse this trend by helping women recognize the market value of their craft and connect them to fair trade networks.

Women who once gave away their embroidered pieces to traders at throwaway prices now produce goods through the SEWA Trade Facilitation Centre, earning sustainable livelihoods from skills they already possessed. Crucially, craft-based employment does not require significant infrastructure – it can continue during drought when field work stops, providing income precisely when other sources dry up.

SEWA’s documented disaster response program explicitly includes craft activity as a form of drought relief, and the work was carried out not by outside staff but by SEWA members from the affected villages themselves. These members thereby escaped the drudgery of standard relief works and used skills they already had. This is a key philosophical distinction: SEWA treats women as skilled workers, not as aid recipients.

Water conservation as employment 🔗

Alongside craft work, SEWA developed a parallel strand of drought response: employing women directly in water conservation activities. This approach did two things at once – it created income during drought and addressed the structural water scarcity that made each drought worse than the last.

SEWA’s drought response recommendations included employment around water conservation, roof rainwater harvesting for every house, regular supply of water by tankers, better communications for remote villages, plantations for drought prevention, and mobile fair price shops. These were not ideas handed down by outside experts – they came from the affected communities themselves, consistent with SEWA’s founding principle that poor women best understand what is needed and are best at implementing the programmes.

SEWA’s Women, Water and Work Campaign, begun in 1995 in the semi-arid regions of Gujarat, organized women’s groups to take on water harvesting, watershed management, handpump repair, pipeline maintenance, and revival of traditional water sources. SEWA has also introduced solar pumps which eliminated fuel expenses and built underground insulated cement tanks to store water in desert areas – practical infrastructure that reduces vulnerability before the next drought begins.

Research on this campaign found that women’s participation in water management produced results beyond just water access. Women benefited through increased income, reduced drudgery, improvements in family livelihoods, reduced migration of both women and men, and increased participation in SEWA’s other programs. The water campaign became a gateway to broader economic and civic engagement.

Flood relief and health interventions 🔗

If drought is Gujarat’s slow crisis, floods are its sudden one. When the monsoon fails for years and then arrives in force, or when rivers overflow their banks, the consequences are rapid and severe. Communities that were already weakened by drought face inundation, loss of crops and livestock, displacement, contaminated water, and a surge in waterborne disease.

SEWA’s flood response is built around the same core principle as its drought work: move quickly, work through community members, and address both immediate and longer-term needs simultaneously.

Immediate relief grounded in community knowledge 🔗

When floods hit Assam and Gujarat in 2022, SEWA focused on disease prevention, water treatment, food, medication, and hygiene distribution. The organization’s grassroots structure made it fast. In every village, SEWA has a local leader called an aagewan – a grassroots organizer who maintains direct contact with community members by phone and in person. These aagewans were the first to know when floodwaters rose at night, making evacuation difficult. They coordinated responses before outside agencies could even assess the situation.

In inundated areas, SEWA distributed chlorine tablets to reduce the chances of waterborne illness and trained aagewans on water- and mosquito-borne disease prevention, ensuring people started boiling water and using mosquito nets. This disease-prevention work was critical: post-flood environments are breeding grounds for cholera, typhoid, malaria, and dengue, all of which can cause more deaths than the flood itself.

Turning young workers into health responders 🔗

One of SEWA’s most innovative flood responses is its use of the crisis itself to create new employment. When floods disrupted the regular livelihoods of younger SEWA members in Chhota Udaipur, hundreds joined healthcare efforts, receiving training on how to use medical devices and then going from household to household in impacted villages to assess the burden of disease, link people with treatment, and provide health education. They also distributed over-the-counter medications like paracetamol and decongestants to ease the load on physicians.

Post-flood health camps followed. SEWA opened camps in rural areas where people could access care during the temperature spikes that came after flooding. Fifty to 150 people came each day the clinics were open, presenting with waterborne diseases, fungal infections, non-communicable conditions like diabetes or hypertension, and heat-related illness – all connected with a healthcare provider and given access to water and basic care.

Linking households to government entitlements 🔗

SEWA’s relief work does not stop at distributing supplies. It deliberately connects flood-affected families to the government programs they are entitled to – programs they may not know about or have the documentation to access. After conducting surveys to assess flood damage to housing, crops, and farms, SEWA appealed to local government for compensation, with close to 1,500 households receiving amounts ranging from ₹5,000 to ₹9,500 INR, including households in debt. This linking of poor women to institutional systems is a consistent feature of SEWA’s work – it builds state accountability rather than replacing it.

Empowering women to build resilience 🔗

The distinction between disaster relief and disaster resilience is, in practice, about time horizon. Relief addresses the immediate crisis. Resilience reduces the damage the next crisis causes. SEWA’s work is most distinctive in how deliberately it links the two.

Women as leaders, not recipients 🔗

SEWA’s core philosophical position is that poor women should not be seen as victims of disasters, but as people with the most experience of managing crises – and therefore as the most appropriate leaders of disaster response. SEWA has become more assertive in saying that poor people are good at dealing with crises because they face them all the time, and that the basis of disaster response should be the affected people – and especially women – who best understand what is needed and are best at implementing programmes.

This is not a rhetorical position. It is an operational one. SEWA does not hire outside experts to design and deliver relief. It trains its own members to do it, pays them for that work, and makes them accountable to their communities. The aagewan system, which proved critical in the 2022 floods, is an expression of this approach: local women with deep community relationships, trained and equipped to act.

Long-term development rooted in disaster experience 🔗

After the severe drought of 2000, SEWA drew a clear conclusion: disaster relief must be integrated into longer-term development planning. It launched two major initiatives – Jeevika, a long-term development program for drought-affected areas, and a formal Disaster Preparedness Plan – both planned as joint activities with government. The Government of India and the Government of Gujarat selected SEWA as the lead partner in the Livelihood Security Project for Earthquake Affected Rural Households in Gujarat, a recognition of its proven effectiveness.

SEWA’s participation in government committees on rural development, micro-credit, environment, and water also reflects this long-term orientation. It does not just respond to disasters – it shapes the policies that determine how well communities can withstand them.

Economic security as the foundation of resilience 🔗

At the heart of SEWA’s resilience work is a recognition that economic vulnerability is what turns a drought or flood into a catastrophe. A woman with savings, insurance, craft skills, and a community network can survive a disaster. A woman with none of these things cannot. Because of cultural and structural barriers, women have historically not been protected against climate shocks – they have limited access to finance, markets, and productive technologies.

SEWA’s response to this has been to build exactly those resources: the SEWA Bank for savings and credit, an insurance scheme, craft cooperatives for stable income, and collective water management for reduced daily labor. Successive disasters had reduced the rural poor’s economic status from subsistence to survival level – SEWA’s work is explicitly aimed at reversing that trajectory, so that the next disaster finds its members with more capacity to absorb the shock than the last one did.

The results of women’s participation in water conservation are illustrative: reduced migration of both women and men, stronger collective agency, and the confidence of women to independently negotiate in public domains that had previously been closed to them. These are not just welfare gains – they are resilience gains, the kind that change how a community responds to the next flood or the next drought.

What do you think? SEWA’s model insists that poor women are the best managers of their own disasters – yet most international aid frameworks still treat affected communities as recipients rather than responders. Does centering women’s leadership in disaster response change only the process, or does it also change the outcomes? And as climate change makes weather disasters more frequent and severe across South Asia, what would it take to scale SEWA’s community-rooted model beyond Gujarat?

References

1. https://www.wiego.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Vaux-Lund-Working-Women-Security.pdf
2. https://www.directrelief.org/2022/12/using-lessons-from-covid-sewa-responds-to-climate-emergencies-in-india/
3. https://www.gdrc.org/icm/makiko/sewaE7.html
4. https://www.explorationscompany.com/impact-csr/sewa-india/
5. https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/50065
6. https://www.icrw.org/women-led-climate-action-in-the-informal-economy/
7. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/governance/sewa-s-experience-with-women-shgs-cooperative-member-owned-organisations-94904