In the early 1970s, as a lawyer working with a textile labor union in Ahmedabad, Ela Bhatt kept encountering self-employed women — street vendors, home-based garment workers, waste-pickers — who worked full days yet had no legal recognition as workers at all, no access to loans except from predatory moneylenders, and no organization to represent their interests.
In 1972, she founded the Self-Employed Women's Association, or SEWA, one of the first organizations to treat informal, self-employed women's work as real labor deserving real protections, rather than treating it as invisible economic activity outside the formal system.
When banks refused to lend to these women, dismissing them as too poor and too high-risk, Bhatt helped them start their own bank in 1974, capitalized entirely by the women members themselves, each contributing a small amount of savings — a radical idea at the time, that poor, largely illiterate women could successfully run financial institutions for themselves.
SEWA grew over the following decades into one of the largest unions of informal workers in the world, and its model of women-owned cooperative banking has since been studied and replicated in microfinance programs across the globe.