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Washington D.C., December 1, 2004—
The International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank Group, has signed a grant agreement worth $250,000 with the Self Employed Women’s Association’s Trade Facilitation Center (STFC), an Indian cooperative organization that helps women entrepreneurs. The grant will help to expand and upgrade STFC’s product quality, management, and resources, as well as improve the cooperative’s access to global markets.
SEWA is Asia’s largest member-based organization of poor, self-employed women workers. It has a membership of about 800,000, mainly in Gujarat state in northwest India. Of this membership, over 15,000 women are involved in embroidery work in semiarid and disaster-prone areas of Gujarat. In the past three years, heavy droughts and a devastating earthquake have made these women dependent on the production of embroidered goods and other crafts for their livelihood.
SEWA has been instrumental in organizing the women’s production process and helping them sell their goods through its shops, trade fairs, and exports. In the last five years, the STFC, which is also supported by IFC, has realized annual sales ranging between $60,000 and $100,000 on embroidered goods and textile based crafts.
IFC has mobilized this funding through a technical assistance partnership with the Dutch government. IFC has also provided direct technical assistance and capital to SEWA and is working with its subsidiary, the SEWA Bank, in housing finance, microinsurance, and private sector rural health care. This supporting activity is provided through IFC’s Strengthening Grassroots Business Initiative.
Strengthening Grassroots Business Initiative
Jointly with the World Bank, IFC has launched a new initiative to support efforts by poor, marginalized people to expand revenue-generating activities that bring them into the market economy. This initiative can provide technical assistance or patient capital investments to strengthen organizations' access to markets, management capacity, and capital structure. Recipients can be not-for-profit or for-profit. The initial focus is to provide direct support to pilot projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The initiative will also seek the most effective ways to reach a wide range of grassroots businesses and promote a more wholesale approach to supporting this sector. For more information, please visit
www.ifc.org/gbo
The mission of IFC (
www.ifc.org
) is to promote sustainable private sector investment in developing countries, helping to reduce poverty and improve people’s lives. IFC finances private sector investments in the developing world, mobilizes capital in the international financial markets, helps clients improve social and environmental sustainability, and provides technical assistance and advice to governments and businesses. From its founding in 1956 through FY04, IFC has committed more than $44 billion of its own funds and arranged $23 billion in syndications for 3,143 companies in 140 developing countries. IFC’s worldwide committed portfolio as of FY04 was $17.9 billion for its own account and $5.5 billion held for participants in loan syndications.
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