SEWA Bank: In the NYTimes and Working with CMF

This weekend I came across a good New York Times article on SEWA Bank and its founder, Ela Bhatt. SEWA Bank is based in Ahmedabad, was founded in 1981, and now has overall 500,000 women members. The cooperative bank, which is allowed to take in savings (all cooperative banks are allowed, non-banking financial companies are not allowed), has about 350,000 depositors and provides health and life insurance to about 100,000 of its members. This article was particularly interesting because though I knew about SEWA, I knew very little about its founder Ela Bhatt.

SEWA also happens to be one of CMF's most active partners, as we have several ongoing projects with the bank. We recently published an overview of these projects, which CMF and Harvard (mainly my colleague Ami Bhavsar Vyas from the CMF side) developed using a presentation we made to SEWA's management. The overview details CMF's progress on projects including: 1) developing unique identification codes for each client, 2) how location of loan officers' homes affects client take-up and use of financial products, and 3) business training.

WIth the business training project, the three principal investigators (Rohini Pande-Harvard, Erica Field-Harvard & Seema Jayachandran - Stanford), recently wrote a three-page summary of the project's findings. Interestingly, women who attended SEWA's business training took out a new SEWA loan in the next four months at a higher rate than control group SEWA members who did not attend. Specifically, 6% of control group members took out a new loan and 14% that took the training took out a new loan. My favorite finding is that in three main areas (housing, business creation/expansion, children's education) that training participants wanted to improve within, SEWA members that participated in the training used their loans toward these purposes at a much higher rate. The figure below details this finding.


If you are interested in other findings from the SEWA-CMF business training project, I encourage you to check out the summary.