About SEWA TFC

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The Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) has been promoting an integrated approach to livelihood security of women in the informal sector, for the past three decades. It has been actively working towards women’s empowerment. SEWA comprises of over 11,000 grassroot producer groups, 200 cooperatives and 11 federations in seven states of India. SEWA’s model of self-reliance is based on organizing women to gain full employment and self reliance. In response to the demand for creating sustainable livelihood strategies for the poorest of the poor women producers, The SEWA Trade Facilitation Centre (STFC) was established as the commercial arms of SEWA in the textiles and handicrafts sector. The vision of STFC was to ensure that craftswomen in the informal sector have socio-economic security and full employment, by building a grassroot business enterprise of the artisans. The STFC achieves this by sustained, profitable, and efficient coordination of the design, production, and marketing of their products and services in mainstream national and global markets.

The SEWA Trade Facilitation Centre (STFC) is a unique (grassroot) commercial enterprise formed by more than 15,000 rural artisan-shareholders from desert districts of North Gujarat. to overcome their impoverished condition through enhanced trade. STFC has transformed their activity into a sustainable commercial viable enterprise, providing full income and livelihood security to its shareholders through effective integration with mainstream national and global markets.

STFC addresses the major barriers faced by poor grassroots producers and provides a range of integrated solutions to turn their activity into a successful commercial venture with the main objective of providing sustainable livelihood alternatives. STFC has transformed the project based craft activity into a full fledge commercial enterprise. The artisan women were implementing the craft activity on a project basis and have access to a limited market which was upto fair trade. The finishing, stitching, cutting and design etc. have been out sourced earlier which always discourage buyer to build relationship. The production is also been carried out on a scattered basis which was bringing the rejection rate at 25% of higher rate. With the inception of STFC integrated supply chain mechanism worked out and production have been organised which resulted into lower down rejection rate upto 11% and reduced the production cycle from six month to two and a half month.