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SEWA

A System Design for
self employed women.

A System Design for self employed women.

In India, approximately 94% of the female workforce operates in the informal sector, representing over 150 million women whose uncounted labor in fields, homes, and streets contributes nearly one-third of the national GDP, yet they remain trapped in systemic invisibility characterized by working poverty, gendered wage gaps, and a lack of legal labor status.

Although the government has launched ambitious digital platforms like e-Shram and credit schemes like PM-SVANidhi, these top-down interventions often fail to reach the most marginalized due to a persistent last mile gap.

Industry

Service Design

Informal Women workers

My Role

Field Research

User Interaction

Ideation

Information Architecture

Industry

| Service Design

| Informal Workers Sector

My Role

| User Research | Visual Development

| Brand Strategy | Narrative Building

Project

Team

Timeline

4 week

Tools

Adobe Illustrator | Figma

Service design tools

| Adobe Illustrator | Figma

| Service design tools

Why

Choosing this topic as my system design module allows me to understand the existance of this large interdependent ecosystem, studying Informal women’s sector is essential because traditional economic models and labor policies are designed for a formal employer-employee relationship that simply does not exist for informal women workforce. Without a rigorous, grassroots-level analysis, these women remain statistically invisible.

Organizations like the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) have spent decades building a revolutionary, Struggle and Development model to bridge this gap, yet their systemic success remains under-recognized in mainstream urban discourse.


Choosing this topic as my system design module allows me to understand the existence of this large interdependent ecosystem, studying Informal women’s sector is essential because traditional economic models and labor policies are designed for a formal employer-employee relationship that simply does not exist for informal women workforce. Without a rigorous, grassroots-level analysis, these women remain statistically invisible.

Organizations like the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) have spent decades building a revolutionary, Struggle and Development model to bridge this gap, yet their systemic success remains under-recognized in mainstream urban discourse.

Objective

To analyze and map the interdependent socio-economic barriers like legal invisibility, financial exclusion and time poverty. Also to identify strategic systemic leverage points where integrated interventions, such as those modeled by SEWA, can disrupt this cycle to foster long-term economic resilience and self-reliance.

Problem statement

Problem
statement

The lack of awareness of the skill development and self reliance models like SEWA creates a profound Structural Access Gap preventing marginalized workers from accessing the integrated vocational training and social security necessary to achieve true economic self-reliance.

Primary Research

SEWA Reception Centre, Opp. Victoria Garden, Bhadra,
Ahmedabad - 380 001. India.

SEWA Reception Centre, Opp. Victoria Garden, Bhadra, Ahmedabad.

Indian Academy For Self Employed Women (IASEW),Basic literacy Training session.

WHAT

SEWA is a national-level institutional platform that enables informal women workers to access livelihood, childcare, security, social protection, and policy recognition at scale.

WHY

Studying and promoting this model is essential to create a human-centric design language that recognizes self-employment as a valid economic status.

WHO

The women workers of the Unorganized /informal sector.

A worker-owned ecosystem like SEWA that transitions these women from isolated laborers to a collective

The women workers of the Unorganized informal sector. A worker-owned ecosystem like SEWA that transitions these women from isolated laborers to a collective

Understanding the problems associated
with women workers and SEWA

Understanding the problems associated with women workers and SEWA

After visiting the SEWA head office and talking to facilitators as well as grassroot workers at IASEW we gained some insights about the problems and challenges they face throughout their journey

Sewa's services

User Interviews:

Persona Boards

User Journey and Empathy mapping:

Creating a visual timeline that tracks every touchpoint, emotion, and friction point a person experiences while trying to achieve a specific goal within a system.

Actors Mapping

A visual diagram that identifies all individuals and organizations within a system and illustrates the relationships, power dynamics between them

Service Ecosystem Mapping

visualization of the entire network of stakeholders, touchpoints and external environmental factors that interact to sustain a service or system.

Service Quality Gap Model:

We used this framework to identify the disconnects between a service provider’s delivery and the user’s actual experience.

After conducting the research to understand the pain points of the user and finding out the service gaps we redefined our problem statement and came up with some design interventions

After conducting the research to understand the pain points of the user and finding out the service gaps we redefined our problem statement and came up with some design interventions

Final Outcomes:

Designing a toolkit that equips women with practical resources to learn literacy, numeracy, hygiene, and safety skills. It empowers them to apply knowledge in daily life.

SEWA SATHI KIT
Credits

sewa.org | iasew.org

SEWA Ahmedabad, IASEW Ahmedabad

Project Guide

Dr. Anil Sinha | Prof. Saurabh Vyas

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©Shailesh Hambarde
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