Connected, women gain strength

A highlight of the launch of the mWomen Programme was the insights given by members of India’s Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) on the transformative effects of mobile phones.

Reema Nanavaty, President of SEWA feels that mobile phones are a tool for organizing and connecting women across work and across the world.

“Connected, women gain more strength,” she said, “we feel that having cell phones is one of the ways of fighting and moving out of poverty. Disconnected, we will always stay behind.”

Kapilaben Vankar, member of SEWA’s executive committee, then discussed how gaining access to a mobile phone has improved her life.

“I’m a small farmer and I cultivate lily flowers. Every morning I have to pick the flowers and go and sell them in the market. Before (I bought my cell phone through an association loan) I had to move from market to market, from one trader to the other, often spending the entire day in finding a proper market.

“But now I use my cell phone. I call up the different markets while I’m plucking the lily flowers, and by nine in the morning, my flowers reach the market. It saves me tremendous time and also money. I earn almost 1,500 to 2,000 rupees as an additional income.

“I’ve used this extra income to diversify and set up a small little food security-related enterprise. Now I use my cell phone to source food grains from small farmers in the neighbouring villages, and I sell it back to my sisters in the villages. So now I have two enterprises which I conduct using my cell phone.

“And the third advantage,” she says, “is that when my sisters are ill and they have to immediately contact the hospitals, I use the cell phone for that.”

Kapilaben ended her account on stage by telling the audience: “It is my dream that in the coming three years, all my 1.5 million sisters have cell phones, because it is a powerful tool for sisters like us to get connected, become more and more economically secured, and also, we will be able to fight out poverty.”

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