UNDP Launches SahiDisha Campaign to Celebrate Women's Livelihoods & Entrepreneurship in Rural India

By: WE Staff | Friday, 19 March 2021

The UNDP (United Nations Development Program) has launched a campaign, "SahiDisha" to celebrate women's livelihoods and entrepreneurship in the rural parts of India. The campaign highlights the issues and hurdles that impact the opportunities of women living in rural India to access livelihoods and jobs. It also focuses on the problems in establishing enterprises that will help women in becoming more self-reliant.

SahiDisha is a three-year partnership between the Indian Development Foundation, UNDP, and Xynteo, supported by IKEA Foundation. This partnership is aimed at helping one million underprivileged women in India to learn marketable skills which enable them to connect with income opportunities.

Launched in 2015, this partnership brings together a diverse set of partners, including national and international businesses, government, educational and training institutions, and civil society, to enable women to secure employment or start their enterprise.

Women face significant social and economic barriers in participating in India's workforce. Women face significant disparities in wages across industrial sectors. From 30.3 percent in 1990, India's FLFP (Female Labor Force Participation) has dropped to 20.3 percent. IMF estimates suggest that India's GDP could rise by 27 percent if the number of women workers were equal to men workers.

The SahiDisha campaign harmonizes private sector demand through skills and training with the supply that meets women’s aspirations, converges multiple interventions including skill-based training, counseling, and entrepreneurship training to enable women’s economic empowerment. It ensures quality and scalability through a robust certification model. The campaign also embeds concurrent monitoring and evaluation in project design and develop innovative public-private collaboration to create a benchmark for scale and impact by demonstrating the power of collaboration.

The campaign is active in Delhi NCR, Haryana, Telangana, Karnataka, and Maharashtra.

According to UNDP, apart from providing job opportunities to women, the initiative also provided psycho-social support to empower and mentor women in starting their own businesses and enterprises.

UNDP is the UN's global development network headquartered in New York. It promotes investment and technical cooperation among the nations.

UNDP works in about 170 countries and territories, helping to achieve the eradication of poverty and the reduction of inequalities and exclusion, and help countries to develop policies, leadership skills, partnering abilities, institutional capabilities, and build resilience to sustain development results. The organization is funded by voluntary contributions from the member states of the United Nations and it is operated in 170 countries and territories. India is a charter member of the United Nations and participates in all of its specialized agencies and organizations.