During my first visit to SEWA’s headquarters, Ela showed me stacks of enormous ledgers in SEWA’s small one-room office. They contained the meticulous records that she and a few other staff members kept of the SEWA loans and repayments. As I looked at the columns of tidily handwritten numbers, I imagined the small business that each represented. Each number, so small and simple on the page, contained a wealth of new possibilities for a woman and her family.
Ela told me about the women she’d met who, thanks to SEWA’s microfinancing programs and education resources, were for the first time able to achieve financial independence from their husbands’ families. By coming together to share resources and find power in solidarity, they were gaining security and freedom. Their work and expertise were being respected and valued for the first time.
Ela and I immediately connected. We shared a commitment to putting people first. We recognized in each other a determination to keep fighting for every small step forward, every tangible but unglamorous difference we could make in individual lives. Over the years, I’ve been overjoyed to see the organization she founded grow in size and evolve to include self-employed women from many different trades.
There have been setbacks, as there always are when you’re trying to make meaningful change in difficult circumstances. As SEWA has grown in size and reach, government officials and business leaders (mostly men) have sometimes felt threatened and pushed back. While SEWA successfully petitioned the International Labour Organization to expand the definition of labor to include home-based work, it has not yet convinced many governments in South Asia to ratify the change. Reema Nanavaty, SEWA’s director and Ela’s daughter-in-law, calls them “constructive struggles.” Reema is a serene, whip-smart woman in her early sixties who always has a quick smile and expansively gesturing hands as she talks.
Ela’s passing in 2022, at age eighty-nine, was a great loss. It can be hard for a group to maintain momentum after its founder is gone. But there is a SEWA saying: “Every woman is Elaben.” The organization that Ela started has grown into a broader women’s movement, able to carry on her spirit of determination and resilience. It has inspired other SEWAs in South Asia, southern Africa, and Latin America. When I first visited SEWA in 1995 it had 140,000 members—today that number is nearly three million.
Over the past three decades, I’ve seen a whole new generation of women grow up and join this movement. They’re bringing their own energy and ideas to old problems and new ones. SEWA’s members have valuable insights into the challenges that poor women—and men—are facing and the solutions that would make a real difference in their lives. In Cape Town, South Africa, I met with women who came together to transform their position as squatters into homeownership and community leadership. In Mumbai, I visited a store run by SEWA women textile workers who brought their labor together to create a brand that would connect their artisan members to a global market for greater income security. In New York, I try to see Reema when she visits, and I was thrilled to welcome her to Little Rock in December 2022 to speak about SEWA’s successes at the Clinton Presidential Center’s Women’s Voices Summit.
I have also partnered with SEWA through the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). The climate resilience fund I announced in Little Rann came out of a CGI partnership with SEWA, the Atlantic Council, and other organizations. The fund focuses on the needs and perspectives of women experiencing extreme heat and provides resources to protect them from the economic and health effects. Among other things, it provides heat insurance, so women like those salt farmers don’t lose income on days when it’s too hot for them to work safely.
The climate crisis is already harming people all over the world, both men and women. But women generally are getting the worst of it. Physically, women are more susceptible to heat-related illness and death. Extreme temperatures have adverse effects on neonatal and maternal health. Women also continue to be employed less and paid less than men. So when temperatures rise and it’s unsafe for them to work, or they miss a shift because their town is flooding and they have to move their kids to higher ground, or a prolonged drought makes them climate refugees, women’s lives become even more economically precarious. Because women are often holding families together, the impact ripples out to children and across communities. Globally, women and girls represent 80 percent of climate refugees—and that number is sure to grow in the years ahead. When women are displaced, they are at increased risk of violence, human trafficking, and stalled education and employment opportunities.
To the salt farmers in Little Rann, climate change is not abstract—and it’s not a problem of the future. It’s here now, making their already brutal work increasingly untenable. But the women I met with also told me how they’re adapting. Until recently, the pumps that brought groundwater to the surface were all powered by diesel fuel. The generators were dirty and required diligent monitoring not to overheat. Most important, they required the purchase of diesel fuel to run all season.
Diesel has always been expensive, cutting into the salt farmers’ profits. But in recent years costs have risen steeply, requiring them to take out loans at the start of the season to buy enough to keep the pumps running. As a result, families were ending the season in debt. Think about that: After months of grueling work in the purgatory between sun and salt, after keeping their children out of school, after sacrificing the skin of their hands and feet and faces to the abrasion of brine and wind, families still owed money to the diesel distributors and salt merchants who fronted them loans to pay for fuel.
That’s why, several years ago, NGOs including SEWA began developing solar-powered pumps designed to suit the needs of the salt farmers and the unique landscape of the Rann. These pumps have more horsepower to lift brine, which is heavier than water, and a flexible stand for the solar panels to optimize the amount of sunlight they can use. But solar-powered pumps designed for the salt flats were useless if the salt workers couldn’t afford them. So SEWA worked with one of India’s largest banks to develop low-cost loans for their purchase. SEWA also convinced the state government to offer subsidies for families wanting to buy them.
The solar panels themselves harness the one natural resource—besides salt—that the desert of Little Rann has in abundance. They relieve salt farmers of their obligations to fuel merchants and predatory loans, allowing them to come home from a season of hard work with meaningful profits to invest back in their families and communities. And in the offseason, many women carry these panels back to their villages. There, the possibilities multiply. On their own, the panels provide energy that lights homes after sunset for kids to study at night. Many women share the output of the panels with their communities for a small fee. They may also sell output to the grid for additional income or create their own microgrids with other local residents.
All this was possible because SEWA took a people-first approach to solving problems: They asked what members needed and how they could make their lives a little better. No idea was too small. The women I spoke to were hopeful and happy about the new opportunities to put away some money that would have gone to diesel fuel. “I get to make money. It’s my money,” one woman told me triumphantly.
In late 2023, I arrived in another desert. Instead of sweating beside sunbaked salt pans, in Dubai I was cocooned in the air-conditioned conference rooms of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) annual meeting, also known as Conference of the Parties, or COP. Since the first COP in Berlin in 1995, global leaders have come together once a year to discuss the climate crisis and commit to taking action, including reducing carbon emissions, accelerating a clean energy transition, and helping countries adapt and build resilience. This one was COP 28.
It’s a diplomatic Rubik’s Cube. The policy trade-offs are brutal and so are the politics. Representatives from small island nations like the Maldives warn that they are literally going to be washed away unless the world takes bold action. But oil-producing states like Saudi Arabia and Russia don’t want to give up on fossil fuels. And it’s true that if energy costs rise it will disproportionately hurt poor people around the world. Ahead of a COP conference in Copenhagen in 2009, the Indian environment minister made an impassioned plea to me: Addressing climate change should be the responsibility of wealthy, industrialized countries like the United States that had been pumping carbon dioxide into the air for centuries, not developing nations like India that still needed to lift millions out of poverty. There’s a moral logic to that argument, but it runs up against immovable math. It will be impossible to stop a global climate catastrophe if big countries like India and China don’t curb their emissions. And this really is a crisis that threatens us all. About 40 percent of people on Earth live within sixty miles of a coast. Extreme weather, rising seas, and soaring temperatures know no borders.
Crafting a global consensus with real commitments to action takes creative and persistent diplomacy. Sometimes that even means barging into closed-door meetings uninvited, as President Obama and I did in Copenhagen, when we found out China was trying to stop, or at least dilute, an agreement we were trying to broker. Chinese guards literally tried to bar the door, to no avail. Newsweek later described us as “a diplomatic version of Starsky and Hutch.”
I was attending COP 28 not as secretary of state but as the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation’s global ambassador for heat, health, and gender, in partnership with the Atlantic Council and CGI. My goal was to call attention to the growing impacts of extreme heat on women and girls in vulnerable communities across the globe. As world leaders discussed how and if it was possible to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, I thought of the immediate impact that every half degree of warming has on the daily lives of the salt rakers in Little Rann and women all over the world.
Since I’d left India, the United States had sweated through its hottest summer on record. When I added salt to tomatoes or eggs, or passed a shaker to someone, I remembered the woman who had given me a handful of crystals, fresh from the salt pans, and the amount of work that goes into every teaspoonful. At COP, I strove to remind government ministers, scientists, and wealthy philanthropists of the human face of our discussions. I told them about the women I’d met and the harsh conditions they endured. In every meeting room, there were lush floral arrangements and tables of cold beverages, a stark contrast to the desert in Little Rann, with no vegetation or shade anywhere to be found.
In meeting after meeting, I pitched CGI’s climate resilience fund and efforts to support women across the Global South adapting to rising temperatures, including scalable innovations like replacing small diesel engines with solar as the salt farmers were doing. The wealthy and powerful investors (primarily men, as you might have guessed) I talked to cared about climate change, but they wanted to fund big, high-profile projects that generate headlines and financial returns. That reflects the reality of climate investing today, not only by the private sector but also by governments and multinational funds. According to the UNFCCC, only 0.01 percent of global finance supports projects that respond to the needs of women. In the United States, less than 2 percent of all philanthropic giving is to organizations that serve women and girls.
I’ve been working for women’s causes for half a century, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised anymore when they get marginalized. Still, over the years as I’ve sought support for SEWA, for other women-led businesses and organizations, and for investment in climate action focused on women, I’ve been shocked and disappointed at how little interest many people have in supporting women and girls. And that’s not just bad for women—it’s holding us all back.
Fundraising wasn’t the only frustration. Many climate activists objected when Dubai was chosen to host COP 28—and when it was reported that the head of the conference, an Emirati oil executive, said that there was no science to suggest eliminating fossil fuels would help us reach the 1.5-degree goal.
Still, two things happened in Dubai under Emirati leadership that gave me reasons to be reassured and hopeful: It was the first COP to end with an explicit call for nations to transition away from fossil fuels and the first to include both a Gender and Climate Day and a Health and Climate Day—an acknowledgment that we can’t talk about climate change without putting women and girls at the forefront. As I reminded delegates in Dubai, women are not just victims of climate change; they are driving the adaptations we need to survive.
Just look at SEWA. Since its inception, SEWA has pursued collaborative, creative approaches that reflect the needs and ideas of its women members, who prove the old saying “If you want something done, ask a busy woman to do it.” I’ve traveled all around the world and talked to women from all different backgrounds who recognize the truth of that—and the power of women working together. Whether we’re starting a business, fundraising for local schools, organizing a meal train, running for office, or creating a three-million-member collective of women artisans and workers to fight for better wages and health care, women roll up their sleeves and get to work.
It’s not that women are born with superpowers. But around the world, in the face of oppression, inequality, and misogyny, women have become resourceful. Women find solutions because we have to. We work together because that’s how we survive.
The women of SEWA have been adapting and innovating since the beginning. They’ve revolutionized how women in India work and how their work is valued. For example, they saw that traditional banking was inaccessible to poor, informally employed women. So they, like the Grameen Bank and BRAC in Bangladesh, pioneered a microfinance model with their SEWA cooperative bank, which is funded, owned, and run by SEWA members and offers microloans as well as financial counseling to poor women. They ran a campaign to ensure that waste recyclers in Ahmedabad were recognized as a vital part of the urban ecosystem. SEWA helped them get better and safer working conditions, like negotiating with waste producers to designate clean waste-pickup sites.
Part of SEWA’s mission is to win recognition of the vital role that “informal” work plays in the life of a village, a city, a region, a nation. The International Monetary Fund defines the informal economy as “activities that have market value and would add to tax revenue and GDP if they were recorded.” This can mean anything from working off the books for a family business to doing garment piecework from home to unregistered domestic work. Informal work exists in every country, but it is particularly prevalent in low- and middle-income countries, where it makes up about a third of the economic activity. In two out of three of those countries, women are more likely than men to be in informal employment—and to have the lowest income.
I have never liked the term “informal sector.” If you’re picking up one-off construction work, tending a market stall in the midday sun, raking salt beds with an implement taller than you are, or sewing garments at home for sale, that’s real work. It’s work that keeps families, communities, and entire nations going. All that makes it informal is its lack of recognition.
SEWA has made informal work visible, so its members are seen and their voices are heard. That has allowed them to pursue better working conditions, better pay, better opportunities. They are approaching the climate crisis in the same way. They, and so many women around the world, don’t have the luxury of despair over climate change. They are finding and facilitating solutions—like the solar pumps, like resilience funds to compensate workers for days they can’t work because of extreme heat. These aren’t substitutes for strong national and global policy changes to limit emissions and make major investments in clean energy. But they’re part of how people are going to survive on a warming planet.
Decades into a career in public service, I continue to remind myself that if we’re going to successfully change the world, we can’t lose sight of the reason we wanted to change it in the first place. Changing the world means nothing if it’s not changing individual lives for the better. That’s why each time I visit SEWA, I find my determination and energy renewed by the joy and grit of the women who greet me. Our conversations remind me that the struggles we as women face look different based on our backgrounds, our races, our religions, our nationalities, our ages, but we share a common fight for equality and opportunity. They remind me that we make change one microloan, one child’s education, one solar panel, and one resilience fund at a time.
Shortly before she passed away, Ela Bhatt planted a sturdy banyan tree in a park across the road from SEWA’s headquarters in Ahmedabad to commemorate the spot where the seeds of SEWA were first sown. Her hope was that the younger generation of workers would nurture it so that they could celebrate SEWA’s hundredth anniversary in 2072 beneath its branches. I always think of Ela like that tree: quiet, enduring, deceptively powerful, still watching over the women of SEWA and protecting them from the sun.
I stood under the banyan tree when I was welcomed back in 2023. As I looked at the faces around me—young and old, many weathered by the sun, all jubilantly smiling—I wished Ela could have been there. The power of SEWA is not just that it provides women workers the opportunity to improve their lives. It is that every day, each of those women shows the rest of the world exactly what’s possible when we stand together and take care of one another and the planet we share.
CARE PACKAGE
In 1971, the same year I met Bill at Yale Law School, Congress passed legislation to create federally funded public childcare centers across the United States. I wasn’t a mom yet (Chelsea would arrive in 1980), but I’d heard plenty of working mothers lament the nightmare of hunting for day care or a space in a preschool for their child. I’d seen friends and colleagues drop out of the workforce, reduce their hours, or miss out on promotions because they had to be home with their families. I hoped the bill would bring much-needed relief to working parents, particularly moms.
The time was right. Women’s participation in the workforce was rising. Researchers had established the importance of early childhood education to brain development. And the national Head Start program created under President Lyndon Johnson was already showing benefits for preschool-aged children from low-income families. The National Education Association had recently proposed universal schooling beginning at age four, and a Library of Congress report noted that childcare and development needs of American families were not being met. By 1971, five million preschool children had working mothers, yet day-care services were available to only an eighth of these children.
Walter Mondale, then a Democratic senator from Minnesota and later Jimmy Carter’s vice president, was paying attention to these trends. He sent a letter to Marian Wright Edelman, the anti-poverty activist and children’s advocate, asking for help developing a national childcare program. I had interned for Marian the previous summer and would go on to work for her at the Children’s Defense Fund. She is a force of nature. Nobody is more passionate about helping poor kids or more astute about what it takes to drive real change. Marian was the first Black woman to pass the bar exam in Mississippi, and she became a civil rights lawyer for the NAACP in Jackson and helped create the Child Development Group of Mississippi, which ran Head Start programs when the state refused federal funding.
Together, the senator and the activist convened a large coalition including education, labor, women’s, and civil rights groups. They spent several months hammering out a proposal that would provide universal childcare and incorporated educational, nutritional, and health services. Mondale and Congressman John Brademas, a Democrat from Indiana, rounded up bipartisan support for the bill in both chambers of Congress. Even twenty-four Senate Republicans voted for it, that’s how good the plan was.
Then it went to President Richard Nixon’s desk. During the 1968 campaign, he had promised to prioritize early childhood development and care. But now, he vetoed the bill. He said the creation of universal childcare would harm families by promoting communal child-raising. He also argued that such a “radical piece of legislation” shouldn’t be enacted without a national debate. That was absurd. Congress had just debated it! And there had been plenty of conversations about the need to support working families going as far back as 1919, when the revolutionary International Congress of Working Women descended on Washington to call for childcare, paid leave, pregnancy care, breastfeeding breaks—even counting housework as part of the eight-hour workday. Nixon’s own White House had declared childcare a priority the previous year.
So what happened? Privately, aides like the young conservative zealot Pat Buchanan had whispered in Nixon’s ear that universal childcare would lead to the Sovietization of American children. A well-coordinated letter-writing campaign by conservative evangelicals and ultra-right-wing groups like the John Birch Society also pressured the president to kill the bill. They claimed government involvement in childcare would threaten the American family and encourage women to enter the workplace instead of staying home. A determined minority overwhelmed a relatively complacent majority. The political scientist Andrew Karch quoted one insider as saying, “It was the right wing that mobilized, and the liberal coalition supporting child development did not. No public outcry ensued…. [Supporters spent] too much time talking to each other and not enough time in finding ways to mobilize and inform public opinion.” As he faced reelection, Nixon made a political calculation: courting vocal conservative voters was more important than keeping his promises to working families.
Nine years later, as a new mom in Little Rock, I came to better understand the impact of Nixon’s veto and our country’s lack of support for working parents. As the first woman partner at the Rose Law Firm, I had to make my own parental leave plan. I was more fortunate than many women to be given that time with my child, but since my salary largely depended on generating legal fees, four months at home meant a significant reduction in pay. When I returned to work, I often felt frustrated with the demands of balancing my law career with my family responsibilities. I remember one morning I was due in court for a trial. Chelsea, then two years old, woke up with a fever and was throwing up. Bill was out of town, the babysitter called in sick, and no relatives lived nearby. Frantic, I called a friend who came to my rescue. I had a pit in my stomach all day. I called home at every break in the trial and rushed back as soon as it was over. When I opened the door, I saw my friend reading to Chelsea, who was thankfully feeling better. For the first time all day, my heart stopped aching. That was one day for me, but for so many moms and dads, that ache is with them every day.
As I grew into motherhood, became First Lady of the United States, and then ran for office myself, I advocated for more assistance to help overstretched families. In 2008, I became the first presidential candidate to put forward a proposal for paid family leave. Part of why I ran was to push these issues from the margins of the political debate right to the top of the agenda. In 2016, I proposed an even more ambitious plan to guarantee up to twelve weeks of paid leave so workers could care for a new child or an ill family member, cap the cost of childcare, provide tax relief for caregivers, and much more. My paid leave plan would have included workers at small businesses who currently have little or no access to even unpaid family leave. But, importantly, it would not have imposed any additional costs on businesses or added to the federal budget deficit, because it would have been paid for not by employers but by closing tax loopholes and making the super rich pay their fair share.
