About
SEWA
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.
System Design
Team Project | 4 weeks
Tools
Adobe Illustrator | Figma
My Role
Field Research | User Interaction
Ideation | Information Architecture
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. While the government has introduced several initiatives and digital platforms, the benefits rarely reach the last mile due to deep-rooted barriers like digital illiteracy and lack of awareness.
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. My interest in this topic stems from a desire to move beyond standard design models and understand how to build for human dignity and structural empowerment.
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.
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
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
User Journey Map :
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.
Service Ecosystem Map
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.
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
Credits
sewa.org
Project Guide
| Dr. Anil Sinha | Prof. Saurabh Vyas
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