I can say that from our past two decades of work with 8,00,000 members of Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India. During my visits to Africa and Latin America to promote Global Trade Facilitation Centre of Women, I have hardly ever found poor women asking for charity or favours. Similarly, our growing links with Global Fairness Initiatives, which works to expand market access, has also shown that poor women do not want subsidies or handouts.

What women want is work, work that is meaningful and gainful: meaningful to her mind and skills and hopes and gainful enough to feed her children, provide for family and run her home.

For this work women want access to assets or capital; capacity in terms of skills and knowhow and systems; institutions that help them access markets; and protection, social protection, such as insurance and social safety net.

As said, what women want is an opportunity to work. Economic opportunity itself is a big step ahead but it does not take women far ahead of their poverty or to high enough income to escape poverty.  Women need to organize, build their own economic institutions, and access markets.

For example, there is a growing business of producing bulbs and bicycles. We linked our hundreds of self help groups to assemble these and sell in rural areas of three districts in Gujarat. In 12 months 11000 women started living off this activity and we are just started.

Similarly, women as farmers produce sesame seeds. But middlemen benefit from commodity price fluctuations. The women formed their own market, Gram Haat, and contained commodity price fluctuations to their advantage. They bought off the stock, wholesale, from all poor women, at higher than selling but lower than selling price. As a result, women, both, as seller and as buyer made 35% to 53% more money on their crops. The families and now neighbours count on them.

Women have to become producer, manager, and owner of their own enterprise: may it be baking or salt making or bidi rolling or hawking or knitting. Their own enterprise, social or economic, builds their collective strength: the 800,000. women I mentioned have joined SEWA in many ways: as a member to our trade union; as a depositor or shareholder of their bank, as a researchers and as trainees in their own academy; or as traders, local to global, in our own Global Trade Facilitation Centre. They have their own institution, organization, that is democratic and working on financial viability. This gives women access to markets.

Markets are responsive and fair when they are free, but many markets especially those in developing or transitional economies are controlled by large corporate and other private sector interests and governments. These days both seem same. As a result changes need to come to the power structure so that women are provided some initial support to enter, know, explore, test, tease, map or tame the markets. And once they entre, and establish, they are provided the capital, management tools and partnerships necessary to expand rather fast.

Small and vibrant projects do make a difference to those who benefit from it and to those who support it, but they do not change the conditions that keep women poor and without work. There is an element of scale which comes in after a while. As many of you here know, with scale marginal costs drop and market share increase.

Often women may end up working long hours in difficult conditions among hostile co-workers all their life, and still may have not much to show in terms of two decent meals, savings or family welfare or children’s education or home or secured future.

As women gain economic power, they achieve a certain political power as well and their political and economic power threaten established social and economic interests and structures.  Many of these interests and institutions, including governments, are or are becoming corrupt and violent and self-serving. Corruption and greed leads to a sharp change in focus for political leaders, with corruption political leaders and their structures strive to remain in power even at the risk of  losing democratic values.

But let me tell you, when women gain power, upscale their force, they focus on peace, on social security, on children and education.  They save for today and provide for tomorrow.

They can join women for advocating policies that encourage maternal leave and equal wages for women worldwide. They can join women in developing strategies to tame trade forces in their favour. Big businesses can join women to spread their worldwide access to link women in Kenya with Sri Lanka with Ahmedabad with New York. The businesses may invest money, a lot of money, in venture projects such as Trade Facilitation Centre and Global Fairness Initiative that directly help poor women move out of poverty on their own, may it be in India or in the USA.

What big businesses should not do is to launch their own initiatives, parallel and often perpendicular, to poor women’s own efforts.

“It is the poor women’s march out of poverty, at their pace and as they wish” as Elaben, our founder always reminds us.