Strengthening employment generation and skill development

• Jul 29, 2025
• 2 min

The ‘Strengthening employment generation and skill development’ initiative was launched to support India’s response to large-scale employment losses in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. To develop a strategic roadmap for job creation, the Government of India constituted a Working Group of Ministers (WGoM) on Employment and Skill Development. MSC served as the secretariat to the WGoM and worked closely with the government and 18 sectoral experts to drive the initiative forward.

MSC provided comprehensive secretarial and advisory support to the WGoM. It helped coordinate consultations with key stakeholders, combining sectoral insights, and applied a structured framework to assess the feasibility, cost-effectiveness, scalability, and time horizon of employment generation strategies. We ensured that the recommended strategies were gender-intentional and transformative. We particularly focused on increasing women’s participation in the workforce. The team facilitated discussions across line ministries and supported the finalization of a consolidated national action plan to inform government decision-making.

The initiative delivered a high-impact employment strategy with the potential to generate approximately 170 million jobs over five years. It proposed structural reforms that could positively affect more than 600 million women by addressing barriers to female labor-force participation. The strategy also projected investments of USD 170 billion from the private sector and USD 27 billion from the government. Covering 18 high-priority sectors and themes, the project laid the foundation for innovative institutional ideas, such as the establishment of a National Employment Fund. The final action plan was widely discussed with concerned ministries and positioned as a key policy input to boost employment across India.

The Gates Foundation and the Government of India commissioned the project.