Jaya Arunachalam (India)

High waters cleared the path for Jaya Arunachalam’s life. In 1977, the Indian state where she was from, Tamil Nadu, was devastated by floods. Jaya enlisted her friends to distribute food and supplies to those in need.

After a year, the situation was not improving. That's when Jaya realized "it was not the flood but poverty that is the greatest disaster," she said.

Jaya was most struck by the working women who earned no more that four to five rupees a day before the flood. They had few rights and little to no chance of advancing their lives.

Moved by what she saw, Jaya founded the Working Women's Forum in 1978. The organization was formed to address the needs of women working in the informal sector, and what Jaya saw as the most urgent: credit.

The organization helped women working as food vendors, rag pickers, cigarette rollers, domestic workers and making handicrafts. They could not walk into a bank and get a loan. For most, the only source of cash to buy materials or feed their families was local moneylenders, who charged as much as ten percent per day on loans. This was a scenario with no escape from debt.

“Oppression comes from the vested interests in society itself, from class, from caste, from gender,” Jaya said. "You have to empower the poorer sectors of the population, that’s the first step toward development.”

At first the banks were resistant to making loans to low income women. Jaya had to find people who could get credit to take out loans for the women and the women would pay them back. Eventually, the Working Women's Forum organized the women into bargaining groups and borrowing pools to bypass the moneylenders.

“It’s women’s incomes that carry most families,” she said. “When a woman works, 100 percent of her earnings goes to the family. When a man works, 65 percent goes to the family. So women are the key to development.”

Before long, women were telling other women about the organization and members were looking for different kinds of support, including family planning information and services.

But Jaya had no experience running a nongovernmental organization. In 1980, she decided to attend CEDPA's fifth Women in Management workshop. There she learned what it took to become an effective leader and manager. She strengthened her fundraising and project management abilities.

Today, the Working Women's Forum offers training in tailoring for young women, a night school for child laborers, boarding schools for boys and girls, nutrition classes and leadership training in addition to financial loans for entrepreneurs.

From its founding, it has now reached close to six million women throughout India.

(March 2010)