National workshop of women’s groups begins in Delhi

The first day of the workshop ‘Strengthening Solidarity: Enabling Women’s Cooperatives and Collective Enterprises to Thrive’ organised by SEWA Cooperative Federation, SEWA Bharat, National Cooperative Union of India (NCUI), and the International Cooperative Alliance – Asia Pacific (ICA-AP) included sessions on ease of doing business and access to financial services

Representatives of at least 100 grassroots women’s enterprises from 18 states deliberated on issues crucial for promoting and strengthening women’s cooperatives during a two-day national workshop that kicked off on Tuesday.

The second day of the workshop on Wednesday will include sessions on governance and capacity-building, and digital inclusion. Participants will also develop a set of recommendations to meet the many challenges that women-led cooperatives face. (Representative image/AFP)

The first day of the workshop ‘Strengthening Solidarity: Enabling Women’s Cooperatives and Collective Enterprises to Thrive’ organised by SEWA Cooperative Federation, SEWA Bharat, National Cooperative Union of India (NCUI), and the International Cooperative Alliance – Asia Pacific (ICA-AP) included sessions on ease of doing business and access to financial services and saw women cooperators sharing their accounts of navigating the Covid-19 pandemic.

Mirai Chatterjee, chairperson, SEWA Cooperative Federation, said that the idea behind the national workshop was to strengthen women’s cooperatives and aid self-reliance. Chatterjee said that the national workshop will delve deeper into various key issues concerning women cooperatives.

“In August 2019, the first ever National Women’s Cooperative Workshop was held in Ahmedabad and chaired by late Ela Bhatt. One of the follow-ups was to have another national-level workshop to take some of the recommendations from the first workshop forward and tackle key issues such as access to finance, ease of business, digital inclusion, and capacity building,” added Chatterjee.

She said that while the pandemic affected livelihoods, women’s cooperatives played a key role in responding to the crisis and restoring livelihoods. Chatterjee said that it was crucial for the government to tap the resilience of these cooperatives by enabling ease of doing business via appropriate laws and policies. She said that access to finance was crucial for women to grow their businesses but procedures for securing loans were laborious.

“Women need loans of smaller amounts. These small investments and infusion of capital show large dividends. This became clear during the Covid-19 pandemic as well. People’s livelihoods were destroyed but we found that 71% of women who were in cooperatives were able to survive the pandemic because of the cooperatives,” said Chatterjee.

The second day of the workshop on Wednesday will include sessions on governance and capacity-building, and digital inclusion. Participants will also develop a set of recommendations to meet the many challenges that women-led cooperatives face. The recommendations will be presented as a Delhi Declaration of Women’s Cooperatives to the newly established committee framing a new cooperative policy, chaired by Suresh Prabhu.

“A lot of the times, these cooperatives fall apart due to poor governance. Board meetings, minutes, record-keeping are crucial. At the same time, digital inclusion is important. Women’s businesses have not been able to digitise themselves due to the need for investments. These issues came up during the first workshop and through the second workshop, we are trying to delve deeper. The deliberations and recommendations will be presented as the Delhi declaration to the committee that has been established by the government for framing a new cooperative policy,” said Chatterjee.