Mahila Housing Trust Empowers South Asian Women to Build Resilience
by RP Siegel
Other than a few backward-looking politicians in Washington and their followers, most of us are well past arguing over whether the world is dramatically and fundamentally changing, and are onto the next thing, which is: what are we going to do about it? Resilience has become the next mindset supply stop on the road to the future. Whether it’s businesses or communities, this is the thing that is going to be most needed going forward.
The Global Resilience Partnership (GRP) was founded in 2014 to pursue this idea with a vision of “new solutions for new realities.” Hence they established the Global Resilience Challenge, inviting groups and organizations to showcase their efforts “on bringing together people and organizations from across sectors to collaborate on innovative and transformative solutions to the toughest resilience challenges.” From among those submitting proposals, cash awards would be given to a select few to allow them to implement their plans. Specifically, the teams would focus on the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and South and Southeast Asia, with “locally driven, high-impact solutions that can build resilience at scale.”
One of the recently announced winners was Mahila SEWA Housing Trust (MHT), an organization that was set up in 1994, “to combine the skills of technical assistance, legal knowledge and income generation opportunities with the housing finance expertise at SEWA Bank to serve the poor self-employed women members.” The trust’s mission is premised on the idea that “Self employed women workers and producers are economically very active and contribute to the growth of the economy. They are mainly involved in production, trading and the service sector. However, in spite of their hard work and their contribution to the country's gross domestic product, they do not have access to financial services, which would help them to upgrade their own work and productivity.”
