Tamil Nadu Women Employment and Safety (TN WESAFE) Operation

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The Government of Tamil Nadu (GoTN) implements a multi-sector program that focuses on women’s economic empowerment through skill building, enterprise support, infrastructure development, and service delivery interventions. Complementing the state’s economic vision, the Tamil Nadu Women’s Policy (2021, draft) puts forward a comprehensive plan for women’s empowerment. The proposed PforR Program, Tamil Nadu Women Employment and Safety (WeSafe) will support a subset of the government program to improve women’s access to quality jobs in non-farm and emerging sectors. Traditional government programming on women’s employment has adopted a sector-specific delivery approach; either through skill development, rural livelihoods, entrepreneurship promotion, or school-to-work transition related interventions. The WeSafe Program proposes an alternate, integrated programming approach to address bottlenecks that impede women’s access to quality jobs through: (i) strengthening state-level planning capacities via the state-led platform on women’s employment and district-led women’s quality employment plans; (ii) promoting targeted skilling and entrepreneurship support linked to emerging sectors; and (iii) improving delivery of enabling services in women’s safety, affordable housing, and care.The Program will support three Result Areas (RAs) that will contribute towards the achievement of the Program Development Objective.1. RA 1: EMPLOY: Improved labor market performance for women in emerging sectors: Result Area 1 introduces an outcome-driven approach to enhance the relevance, accessibility, quality, and efficiency of skills training and entrepreneurship support for women in Tamil Nadu.2. RA 2: ENABLE: Enhanced delivery of enabling services to promote women’s employment: Under Results Area 2, the Program will support setting up an investment framework to improve coordinated outreach, quality, and impact of enabling services particularly safety/violence prevention in public places and workplaces, affordable housing options, and care services.3. RA 3: EMPOWER: Strengthened state capacities, technical partnerships, and institutional structures for women’s employment: Under Results Area 3, the state will develop a common results framework to support the roll-out of the state’s women policy and directly contribute to the state’s economic goal of achieving a trillion-dollar economic status. The Program will support setting-up of a state-led platform for women’s employment.