About

Inclusive Growth (IG)

Over the past two decades, India's contribution to global economic growth has doubled to almost 15 percent. Further, income poverty levels have declined, resulting in 133 million people lifted out of poverty in the past 20 years. However, nearly 300 million people still live in extreme poverty.

UNDP supports government efforts to reduce poverty and promote inclusive and sustainable development that leads to transformational change, bringing about real improvements in people's lives and leaving no one behind.

UNDP fosters partnerships to enable underprivileged people with a special focus on women and girls to have access to skills, jobs, livelihoods, and productive assets. This helps people to diversify the farm and non-farm activities and increase access to credit, financial services, and markets. We also support initiatives that help the poor develop livelihood plans in agriculture, forestry, fisheries, land resource development, rural tourism, and handicrafts.

Through our unique role as a facilitator and knowledge leader, we aim to strengthen institutional linkages between enterprises and skills training providers and to identify synergies between national programmes and missions to help marginalized groups gain access to sustainable skills, jobs, livelihoods, and productive assets. Efforts also aim at addressing the challenge of financial inclusion through a range of financial products and services that reduce the vulnerability of the poor. Empowering women remains a key area of intervention. We also focus on addressing structural aspects of education, training, and economic sectors to overcome the legal, social, and economic blockades that prevent the realization of inclusive growth.

The Inclusive Growth vertical of UNDP in India focuses on policy advocacy, build capacities to create momentum for green recovery, green financing, expand access to green jobs and livelihoods, skilling, increase the use of clean energy solutions and promote South-South cooperation to eradicate poverty, and ensure government's anti-poverty policies are more inclusive to reduce socio-economic inequalities.

Our Goals

UNDP's priorities remain anchored in its mission to continue supporting the government in eradicating poverty and achieving inclusive and sustainable growth to improve the lives of Indian people. People excluded from mainstream development because of their gender, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, disability, or poverty must have a chance to participate in and benefit from development.

Our programmes aim to strengthen sustainable and inclusive pathways to green recovery, build resilience to help prevent and better cope with a crisis such as the spread of Covid-19. We focus on policy advocacy, build capacities to create momentum for green recovery, green financing, expand access to green jobs and livelihoods, skilling, increase the use of clean energy solutions and promote South-South cooperation to eradicate poverty, and ensure government's anti-poverty policies are more inclusive.

Through innovative partnerships that promote inclusive and equitable growth, we aim to continue supporting greater access to national programmes for a vulnerable and marginalized population, improve livelihoods, and augment skill-building for women and youth. UNDP focuses on strengthening capabilities and opportunities to reduce poverty and marginalization in ways that are sustainable from economic, social, and environmental standpoints.

Thematic Focus

  • Women Economic Empowerment
  • Fostering Youth Innovation
  • Rural Economic Development/Strengthening Value Chains
  • Employment and Entrepreneurship Promotion
  • Facilitating Convergence and Access to Social Protection and Entitlements

Our Step towards Green Recovery

UNDP is supporting the analysis of the social and economic impacts of COVID-19 to inform policy and programming and strengthening access to social protection to mitigate the impacts of the crisis. In collaboration with State Governments, civil society organizations, the private sector, and UN agencies, this approach is prioritizing vulnerable communities including the urban poor, tribal communities, marginalized women and youth, disadvantaged castes and groups, waste collectors, construction workers, and migrants and returnees.

This support includes expanding the reach of social protection schemes and entitlements to marginalized individuals and families, facilitating access to local skilling and job opportunities for vulnerable women and youth, restoring livelihoods opportunities for women microentrepreneurs and farmers' and artisans' collectives, generating awareness on COVID through community outreach and social media, addressing stigma and discrimination and gender-based violence, and reviewing SDG plans and indicator frameworks to account for COVID impacts.

We have so far successfully reached 56 districts in 9 states towards livelihood reconstruction and amplified access to jobs for the vulnerable, including women and youth. In addition to the immediate recovery measures, UNDP is focusing on designing sustainable and inclusive pathways to recovery to advance green recovery and build resilience to help prevent and better cope with a future crisis. To this end, the planned measures will strengthen policy advocacy and build capacities to create momentum for green recovery, green financing, expand access to green jobs and livelihoods, and increase the use of clean energy solutions.

Formalizing the informal economy: Livelihood Missions

The challenge of livelihoods is magnified due to the Covid crisis and calls for more sustainable and inclusive growth pathways. Green recovery and resilience require promoting nature-based local jobs and livelihoods, skilling, and entrepreneurship giving impetus to strengthening the capacities of women and girls. We focus on addressing structural aspects of education and training to address institutional, legal, and socio-economic barriers to inclusive growth by creating scalable integrated development solutions, and confronting the barriers faced by women and girls in the economic sector. We foster partnerships between state institutions and the private sector to enable deprived households to improve skills. This helps people move to non-farm activities and increases access to credit, financial services, and markets. Initiatives that help the poor develop livelihood plans in agriculture, forestry, fisheries, land resource development, rural tourism, and handicrafts are also encouraged.

Empowering women through partnerships

UNDP aims to advance social inclusion by promoting positive relationships among men and women, different groups and individuals within communities so that all identity with and belong to a community. For women in India, the challenge is particularly complex. Forty-nine percent of the poor are women and 96 percent of the women work in the informal economy. We foster public-private partnerships for skill-building, creating employment and entrepreneurial security for women. Our projects have not only been able to economically empower women, but it has also able to break the social stigma surrounding the employment of women.

Our Projects

  1. Code Unnati
  2. Covid Socio-economic Response
  3. Disha
  4. Integrated Livelihood Development Programme
  5. Integrated Employment and Entrepreneurship Promotion
  6. Producers in Organized Supply Chain Enterprise (PROSPER)
  7. Women Artisans Skill Enhancement Project (WASEP)
  8. UDDYAM
  9. Youth Co:Lab