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When India’s (SEWA) was founded in 1972, they understood that the informal sector was not going to go away: companies would still rely on women to stitch clothes, collect waste, and clean cement.

And while invisibly working away in homes across the country, SEWA’s leaders knew that they needed to make these women visible, empowering them and offering democratizing ideals; for they form a crucial part of the Indian economy. Indeed, founder Ela Bhatt knew that “poverty is powerlessness. Poverty cannot be removed unless the poor have the power to make decisions that affect their lives.”

SEWA set about providing a powerful community for these women and one that didn’t just focus on how they served and nurtured their members, but, as Mamta Murthi, Vice President, Human Development at the World Bank noted, “gave them the dignity to say we are workers, and the economy relies on us.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the economic security that many believed they had, instantly dissolved. Where once a flexible economy had been seen as a liberating luxury, global shutdowns saw work dry up, and those without the security that a formal labor market provided, felt the reality that had always been an intrinsic part of SEWA members’ lives.

Yet these women, described in a traveling exhibition launched at Harvard as “unburdened by the luxury of conformation,” and often overlooked by their world, forged solutions that were “practical, expedient and mutually beneficial;” models from which we might all learn.

For it is this shift that traditional methodologies in international development do not capture – where the community, not the home authority, can provide the answers we need. Something for which, Fatema Z. Sumar, Executive Director of the , has long campaigned: “If we can we shift the center of the strategy not to a home institution but the community, our risk profile changes.” International development practitioners would no-longer be focused on the needs of their shareholders, but on those who have a genuine stake in the reality of the solutions they propose.

SEWA’s stories show us that the best remedies come from people with real skin in the game, whose analysis is borne out of the struggles they’ve faced. For, as Satchit Balsari, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, notes: “The poor in the global south don’t need aid, they need work.” Balsari is the curator of (We Are One), a traveling exhibition developed by co-curator Hiteshree Das and a team of students across the Harvard graduate schools of engineering, education, design, and the Harvard Kennedy School.

The traveling exhibition provides a space for researchers, policy makers, and civil society to learn from SEWA’s important story. Its members, despite knowing what it means to have a precarious life, have forged localizing approaches that have shaped communities of resilience across the Indian sub-continent. 

Forging a community of nurturance, described by SEWA’s founder, Ela Bhatt, as neither plundering human or natural capital but instead restoring and growing it, they are taking their experiences abroad. Engaging in South-South exchanges, SEWA’s members have helped women in Ghana and Kenya take hold of their livelihoods. As Caleb Shreve, Executive Director of Global Fairness Initiative, which works closely with SEWA, saw: “SEWA knows its members more than anyone. No-one needs to parachute in to look at data. They own the data and tell us what to do.” SEWA’s efforts in Africa have re-tooled communities, showing them how to run focus groups, design questionnaires, and produce reports. Shreve remarks that “they don’t need a Western agent to show them what to do, moreover they can help them understand what they need to do.”

The systemic change that SEWA provokes is one that requires a new model of economic analysis. One that Sumar believes necessitates a “move from a projectized approach to a structural approach,” and one that requires the Western world to realize that “we cannot ask our partners to do something that we aren’t willing to do.”

Sumar’s belief in a ‘sticky change’ that outlasts the cycles of politics and donors, is one that needs to be done in partnership with organizations like SEWA, whose women have for decades survived a world indifferent to their concerns.

The oral stories captured in the HUM SAB EK (We Are One) exhibition offer an insight into how we might liberate our world through a community of resilient nurturers; one exemplified by the women of SEWA.

In January 2025, the traveling exhibition made its second stop outside Harvard at The World Bank headquarters in Washington, DC, before traveling to the West Coast and other regions later this year. This post reflects on the insights from an opening panel discussion which brought together academics, policymakers, NGOs, and development consultants at the .