Sustainable structure and strategies to alleviate poverty: a case study of Self-Employed Women’s Association, a membership based organisation

Eradicating poverty, or even alleviating extreme poverty, has been a long-sought goal of governments, aid agencies, non-governmental organisations, the United Nations, and even the poor themselves. Doing something about extreme poverty became the number one target for the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, and the United Nations has been encouraging and supporting public and private initiatives aimed at poverty eradication. In recent years, attention has moved from governmental-supported and even non-governmental-supported efforts to locally-supported efforts as a key for effective and sustainable poverty alleviation. One such local effort in South Asia is the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a unique membership based organisation (MBO) that was established in 1971 as a trade union working to alleviate poverty at the local level by helping poor women obtain work, income and food security. The objective of this article is to examine the organisation, structure and strategy of SEWA as a way to learn what works best for locally-based organisations in their efforts to alleviate poverty. The conclusion is that SEWAs organisational structure and strategies are important reasons for its success, and that the more organisations like SEWA empower their beneficiaries and collaborate with other poverty alleviation-oriented organisation, the more likely they are to achieve success in poverty alleviation.