ILO COOP Manager Simel Esim joined SEWA, IMAGO Global Grassroots and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a panelist in a webinar on June 23rd. The webinar included a presentation and panel discussion around the “SEWA approach to building sustainable women’s collective enterprises and reflections on SEWA’s enterprise support system.

A presentation by Mirai Chatterjee, President of SEWA Cooperative Federation and Renana Jhabvala, President of SEWA Bharat was followed by a panel discussion by practitioners, researchers and industry experts. The webinar brought together a review of frameworks and lessons learned on collective organizations, women’s agency and the role of enterprise support systems to act as accelerators for collective social enterprises.

ILO COOP Manager Simel Esim presented highlights of global knowledge and practice on women’s collective enterprises to attain the dual objectives of economic sustainability and empowerment. She noted a few models for achieving sustainability through creating enterprise support systems, such as those in Emilia Romagna in Italy, and Mondragon in the Basque country in Spain. She also talked about how cooperative consortia (social cooperatives in Italy) and franchise systems (domestic worker cooperatives in the US) have been used by cooperatives to reach scale.

This webinar was part of a Learning Workshop Series, for the MOVE project, to strengthen and expand women’s mobilization and economic empowerment in SEWA. Each webinar focuses on a dedicated theme, involving multiple stakeholders and discusses global and national experiences and lessons for the evaluation.