Bridging the Knowledge Gap on Women’s Cooperatives
Across the Delhi Declaration (2019), the National Conference on Women’s Cooperatives (2022), and the National Conference with VAMNICOM (2025), one message has remained constant — the urgent need for comprehensive, up-to-date data which tells us status of women’s cooperatives in India.
While women’s cooperatives across sectors have long contributed to livelihoods, social security, and community well-being, their work often goes undocumented and under-recognized in policy and research. SEWA Cooperative Federation, as a Women’s Enterprise Support System (WESS), has consistently advocated for evidence-based insights to strengthen the cooperative movement and make women’s economic contributions visible.
To advance this effort, SEWA Cooperative Federation has partnered with the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA) for an ongoing study titled “Status of Women’s Cooperatives in India.”
A Collaborative Study with IRMA
The study is part of IRMA’s “Tribhuvan Sahkari University” initiative and aims to document and analyze the functioning of women-led cooperatives across different states of India. It will explore crucial dimensions such as:
Governance and leadership structures
Financial and business models
Management and operational challenges
Policy linkages and enabling environments
Empowerment and social impact
By combining SEWA’s field-based experience with IRMA’s research expertise, the study will offer a comprehensive picture of women’s cooperatives in India — not just as economic units but as democratic, member-owned enterprises driving inclusive development.
The Inception Workshop at IRMA–TSU, Anand
The project’s inception workshop was held on 13–14 October 2025 at the IRMA–TSU campus in Anand. The two-day session, facilitated by Prof. Shambu Prasad Chebrolu and Dr. Seema Singh Rawat, brought together faculty members from IRMA and representatives from SEWA Cooperative Federation.
Our Managing Director, Ms. Jigisha Maheta, shared SEWA Federation’s journey as a Women’s Enterprise Support System — explaining how decades of grassroots organizing have informed policies, built cooperatives, and fostered women’s leadership.
IRMA faculty presented insights on gender, collectives, and cooperative governance. The discussions spanned topics such as:
Mixed-method approaches to measuring women’s empowerment (Prof. Preeti Priya)
Embodied experiences of solidarity (Dr. Seema Singh Rawat)
Governance in producer companies (Prof. Madhavi Mehta)
Financing women entrepreneurs globally (Prof. Kishan P.K.V)
Impact of Lakhpati Didis in Gujarat (Prof. Sunil Sangwan)
A lead presentation by Prof. Shambu Prasad highlighted IRMA’s earlier collaboration with SEWA in 1994 — one of the first studies on women cooperatives in India — and outlined the plan for co-creating knowledge through this new phase of research.
Co-Creating Knowledge for Collective Futures
A draft case protocol was developed during the workshop, identifying key themes such as governance, finance, leadership, business models, and empowerment. The fully developed protocol will first be piloted in Gujarat before expanding to other states in the coming months.
Through this collaborative process, SEWA Cooperative Federation and IRMA aim to capture diverse realities from the ground — understanding what enables or constrains women-led cooperatives, and how they can thrive in today’s economic and policy contexts.
Why this study matters
This study builds upon a shared vision — to make women’s cooperatives visible in India’s development narrative and to equip policymakers, practitioners, and institutions with reliable data and analysis.
By mapping the status of women’s cooperatives, the project seeks to:
Strengthen policy advocacy through data-driven evidence
Identify capacity-building needs and opportunities
Inform finance and enterprise development models
Celebrate and learn from innovations led by women cooperatives
Importantly, this work aligns with the priorities outlined in the National Cooperative Policy (2025), which calls for greater inclusion of women in cooperatives, stronger gender-disaggregated data, and targeted institutional support. The policy highlights that women’s cooperatives need visibility, recognition, and tailored interventions to thrive — precisely the gaps this study aims to fill.
In doing so, the collaboration between SEWA Cooperative Federation and IRMA carries forward the commitment expressed across SEWA’s national conferences: that cooperatives remain not just a business model, but a pathway to women’s empowerment, solidarity, and self-reliance.
