Women in Control of Their Lives

Mumbai is the seventh largest city in the world, roughly twice the size of Greater London. Major development is everywhere. When slums are demolished pockets of rough land appear and are grabbed eagerly by team after team of cricket players. They erect small piles of bricks for wickets. One makeshift sports ground has been taken…

The watches we saw today were assembled in a factory called MEADOW, a private company with a difference. It was started and is owned by 22 Self-help Affinity Groups in Tamil Nadu state. Women from the groups work there, recruit the managers and appoint the Board. When they make a profit they each take a…

This movement is relational. Three markers: It starts from what people and their networks do to solve challenges in their lives. It looks at life as it is and not life as we would like to be, and It assumes that in the right context people will support each other, and in the wrong context…

Self-Help Affinity Groups meet every week. They save. They penalise one another for shortcomings. The watchword is precision. We see this also in the watch factory owned by 380 women from 22 Self-help Affinity Groups. We observe the process from making the frame, polishing the gold, assembling what looked like hundreds of parts with painstaking…

He stands without notes and talks about his work. Aloysius Fernandez, founder of the movement that WEvolution is taking forward in the U.K. If there is ego it isn’t easy to discern. But he clearly doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Every five minutes or so he captures several years of learning in a single line or…

Working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on the challenge of scale meant working with Jeff Raikes, formerly CEO at Microsoft. He said to me “we were like Lotus Notes” (a successful but hardly world dominating software company). “We could have gone on like that, we were doing ok. But we wanted more. So…

Eleven women sit cross legged on the floor of a MYRADA training centre. Most wear the same sari, the uniform of their Self-help Affinity Group. They sit with piles of books, lists of transactions, the savings deposited each week over these last eight years, the loans they have made to one another, and loans the…

Raja is our teacher. He uses a long stick to point at the screen. He doesn’t need it to poke us into attention. We are locked on to his every word. He has a lot of experience. Forty or more years of working with MYRADA. His story is one of trial and error. Groups that…