The Housing and Infrastructure Finance Needs of Poor Women: the SEWA Bank Experience

Improved infrastructure is a pressing need for SEWA members of Ahmedabad city. Self-employed women members are active contributors to the economy but receive little back in terms of support or security. Therefore, SEWA organizes them so that they can improve their working conditions and living environment. For most, these two are very closely connected. Many self-employed women like garment-stitchers, weavers, bidi (tobacco) rollers use their home as their workplace. Women who work outside the home, such as vendors and ragpickers, also use their home to store, sort and process their products. Furthermore, the availability of infrastructure affects the productivity of all workers and producers who use their home as a workplace.

The provision of improved housing and infrastructure for poor women forms an important part of the overall development strategy of SEWA. Even though considerable investment and effort has been made by various private and more importantly, public agencies, the lack of adequate and affordable living conditions remains a dream for most of the informal sector. This is certainly true for the members of SEWA residing in the slums of Ahmedabad.

The rationale behind addressing the housing and infrastructure-related needs of members of SEWA Bank include the following:

• keeping SEWA members and their families out of homelessness;
• helping them to upgrade their home, thereby improving their productivity and quality of life;
• improving access to water, sanitation and other basic infrastructure services; and
• providing an asset to increase their economic security.

Women are the major home-users, home-makers and home-based producers. Her home in the form of shelter is not only an asset in the traditional sense, but also a productive asset. This is even more true of poor and working women. Often, assets - such as shelter – are safer in the hands of women than men. Yet, it is women, especially poor women, who find it hardest to access credit for housing and infrastructure.

SEWA Bank has found that as the economic security of their members goes up, the demand for housing and infrastructure loans, including water supply and sanitation services, also increases. As a result, in response to a great demand for such loans from its members, SEWA Bank started its housing and infrastructure finance activities from 1976. SEWA Bank provides both individual and collective loans for various purposes including installation of a private or community source of drinking water, toilets, drainage, electricity, etc.

In order to aid the process of accessing better infrastructure facilities – a critical factor of production for many self-employed women – SEWA Bank has developed a variety of financing options and loan products.

There are many instances throughout Ahmedabad, where the poor have begun to pay voluntarily to install infrastructure in their homes including drinking water and/or sanitation facilities. SEWA Bank has actively facilitated this process by disbursing loans to individual women, who wish to upgrade their existing infrastructure facilities.

Panna Lal ki Chali in Saraspur area of Ahmedabad is one such slum area, where a number of SEWA Bank depositors have taken individual loans to build their own toilets. Loan amounts vary from Rs.3,000-Rs.3,500. The technical supervision for building the toilets is provided by the engineers of mahila Housing SEWA Trust.

Of the 151 families that live in this area, 75 per cent have built their own toilets wit help from Mahila Housing SEWA Trust and SEWA Bank. As Panna Lal ki Chali is connected with the main city sewer line, all of the toilets that have been built here are hooked to the city grid and are the pour-flush model (water-borne system).

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