SWATI Story

At the heart of this journey are the Mahila Vikas Sanghs—independent, women-led collectives that SWATI helped build. These collectives created spaces for rural women to come together, recognise shared concerns, develop leadership and act collectively. Over time, their work has extended beyond individual and family concerns to questions of justice, access to resources, public

services, local development and women’s participation in governance. The conviction that women must be agents of change, rather than simply recipients of development, continues to shape SWATI’s work.

Working across Gujarat and Rajasthan, SWATI has carried this commitment into different spaces where gender inequality is experienced and reproduced. Its work addresses violence against women through community-based justice mechanisms and responses within public health systems. It engages local governance to bring women’s safety, mobility and participation into decisions about villages and public spaces. It also creates opportunities for adolescent girls to build confidence, question restrictive gender norms, exercise their freedom and develop their own visions for the future.

These strands of work are connected by a shared understanding: violence and gender inequality cannot be addressed through individual interventions alone. Women need spaces to exercise agency, collective platforms to claim their rights, and public institutions that recognise their concerns and respond to them. Lasting change requires all three.

Over the years, SWATI’s work has also brought attention to the relationship between women’s rights and their access to land, livelihoods and resources. As the organisation looks towards the challenges of climate change and rural livelihoods, it seeks to deepen this engagement, including with women farmers and salt-pan workers whose lives and work are closely tied to changing environmental conditions.

Today, SWATI works across four districts and seven blocks in Gujarat and Rajasthan, in communities with a combined population of over 25 lakh people. Its approach brings together grassroots action, collective leadership, engagement with public institutions and learning from practice. Throughout this journey, the organisation has remained grounded in the experiences and aspirations of rural women and girls.

For SWATI, transforming people’s lives and changing the systems that shape them are inseparable. It is a commitment that began with women coming together to claim a voice and continues through the work of building a more gender-just society.