The Self-Employed Women's Association and the Algorand Foundation launch a blockchain-based identity platform on mainnet after a successful pilot earlier this year
DELHI, India, April 29, 2025 -- The Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), one of India's oldest and largest organizations supporting informal women workers, is scaling its programming to support access to health and welfare services using blockchain infrastructure built on the Algorand blockchain.
SEWA is onboarding thousands of women into a blockchain-enabled custodial wallet system through a new Digital Health Passport initiative. This system integrates with India's trusted digital identity (Aadhaar) and document-storage platforms (DigiLocker) to securely manage and verify the documentation required to access vital government programs—such as primary health care, child care, and pensions.
The initiative is designed to break one of the most persistent barriers to inclusion: lack of proper documentation. In many cases, names don't match across ID cards, paper files are lost, or the documentation simply never existed. SEWA's community-based workers, known as Aagewans, visit households across different communities in Gujarat to help women identify and upload the necessary documentation into their secure digital wallets.
Before this partnership, SEWA could reach only 40,000 of its 3.5 million members due to administrative burdens. With the new web3 solution powered by Algorand, they are now poised to scale that reach dramatically, empowering millions of women to manage their records independently and gain access to public programs with transparency and trust.
"We see our partnership with the Algorand Foundation as an important step forward in including women in the digital economy, bridging the digital divide," SEWA Director Mirai Chatterjee said. "We have found right from the beginning that women adapt to technology and love to use technology. It's just that it has to be co-created and developed in a language accessible to them and that's easy to use."
"Blockchain isn't just for finance. It's a tool for inclusion," Algorand Foundation Vice President and India Country Head Anil Kakani said, "SEWA's leadership in bringing millions of women into the digital economy shows how blockchain can support real-world needs securely, privately, and at scale. And just as importantly, it demonstrates how blockchain can help ensure the benefits of India's significant health, child care and other safety net investments reach the millions who otherwise might struggle to stay connected to the workforce."
"Algorand is at the heart of our Digital Health Passport," Algorand Foundation Senior Support Engineer Meet Thosar said. "It allows us to confirm identities securely and helps us scale programs like SEWA Shakti Kendras across our network."
The system is privacy-law compliant and scalable, reducing the administrative burden on SEWA's team. It also lays the groundwork for future services like insurance onboarding, claims processing, and potentially direct benefit distribution.
This milestone follows an earlier pilot launched in 2024, which is now in full deployment across SEWA's community centers.
About SEWA
Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) is the largest central trade union of women workers in India's informal economy. Founded in 1972, SEWA organizes nearly 3.5 million low-income, self-employed women across eight states. Its mission is to secure full employment and self-reliance for women through both grassroots organizing and service provision in areas such as health care, child care, insurance, and housing. To learn more, visit sewa.org.
About Algorand Foundation
Algorand's mission is to power a world where information has integrity and innovative ideas can scale. The Algorand Foundation supports Algorand's rapidly growing ecosystem by providing a best-in-class developer environment, supporting key infrastructure and setting technical standards, offering comprehensive support to builders and entrepreneurs, and providing the framework for decentralized governance.
Launched in 2019, the Algorand (ALGO) blockchain has grown into a vibrant ecosystem of developers, entrepreneurs, and enterprise partners that benefit from institutional-grade certainty and resilience. Its low fees, instant finality, and minimal carbon footprint appeal to the protocol's millions of retail users, and developers of all kinds appreciate the ability to use common programming languages like Python. Builders on Algorand are creating protocols and companies that solve important problems at a global scale: instant payments in war and disaster zones, self-sovereign identity for the disenfranchised, supply-chain traceability for global commerce, permissionless protocols addressing financial inclusion, and the creation of entirely new markets through tokenization, to name a few. To learn more and start your journey on Algorand, visit algorand.co
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