Women empowerment through skill development

Abstract

India is slated to become the world’s youngest nation by 2022 and this colossal increase in population will serve to be a huge reservoir of human resources. As per government’s skill gap analysis by 2022, we would need over a 100 million skilled workers in the 24 important sectors of the economy. Even though multiple skill development programmes with huge budgets have been laid out, the target seems to have not been met because of some critical gaps in the education-skilling-employment space, especially for women. A declining female labour force participation at 27%, unfortunately one of the lowest female participation rates in the world, is a core issue in terms of equity development and growth. The major cause of the low labour force participation rates amongst underprivileged women is the lack of opportunities, inaccessibility to resources and the inability to collect all information. There is an imperative need to focus on transferrable skill development, employment and entrepreneurship. Initiatives of promoting skilling and re-skilling at various levels and schemes such as Skill India have had limited impact. An in-depth understanding for an organized and multi-pronged approach to mainstreaming employability and accessibility to opportunities as present in the western part of the world is called for. Hence, the necessity to critically analyze the current status skill development for women and design a future outlook for its promotion after studying the international scenario. The government has launched multiple skilling and development initiatives at various levels to develop skills amongst the women from differing economic backgrounds. Although these initiatives have been beneficial at the lower levels, there is a requirement of broader coordination between the various initiatives and alignment with the national policy. Focus and emphasis also need to be on developing the skills for the new world jobs which threaten majority of the employment generating activities of today. Thus, re-skilling and adaptation to digital and technology becomes an important part of the skilling curriculum. This project focuses on the initiatives and schemes that have been launched by the government in partnership with the various stakeholders, attempts to measure the impact and identify the areas of opportunity wherein skilling and re-skilling will be centric in the era of new world jobs.