For informal women workers’ cooperatives, policy environments shape everyday realities. Regulations affect how cooperatives register, access finance, participate in markets, and receive social protection. When policies are designed without recognising informal work or collective enterprise models, women-led cooperatives often face barriers that limit their growth and sustainability.
Policy engagement at SEWA Cooperative Federation emerges from these lived constraints. It is rooted in the understanding that enterprise strengthening cannot be separated from the systems within which cooperatives operate.
SEWA Cooperative Federation’s policy work is grounded in practice. Over decades of working with women’s cooperatives across sectors, recurring patterns have emerged around governance challenges, market access, social security, and work conditions. These experiences form the basis of our engagement with policymakers and institutions.
Rather than advocating in isolation, we bring collective experiences into dialogue with state, national, and global actors. This includes contributing to consultations, sharing documented learning, and participating in platforms that shape cooperative, labour, and social protection policies for informal women workers.
Much of Federation’s advocacy is informed by documentation, research, and reflective learning produced over time. Annual reports, thematic studies, policy briefs, recommendations help articulate the realities of women’s collective enterprises and translate practice into evidence that can inform decision-making.
This approach allows policy engagement to remain anchored in women’s lived experiences rather than abstract recommendations.
