National Workshop on Urban Livelihoods | 24 Feb 2024

Recently, a two-day national workshop convened in Ranchi, under the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Urban Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NULM), the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The workshop served as a platform for high-level deliberations on emerging trends and opportunities in urban livelihoods, with a primary focus on bolstering resilience and empowerment for women across urban India.
- Participants included State Mission Directors of the State Urban Livelihoods Mission, senior officials from MoHUA and Jharkhand state government, senior officials from UNDP India, leading sector experts, and representatives from research institutions, start-ups, philanthropies, and donor organizations.
The event featured discussions focusing on enabling strategies to foster women-led urban livelihoods and emerging sectors and types of enterprises in climate, services, retail, and manufacturing.
It also explored other themes like the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and the role of philanthropies in addressing issues of urban poverty through identifying priority areas and innovative financial investments.

The National Multidimensional Poverty measures simultaneous deprivations across three equally weighted dimensions of Health, Education, and Standard of Living that are represented by 12 Sustainable Development Goals-aligned indicators.
- These include Nutrition, Child and Adolescent mortality, Maternal Health, Years of schooling, School Attendance, Cooking fuel, Sanitation, Drinking water, Electricity, Housing, Assets, and Bank Accounts.
MPI’s global methodology is based on the robust Alkire and Foster (AF) method that identifies people as poor based on universally acknowledged metrics designed to assess acute poverty, providing a complementary perspective to conventional monetary poverty measures.

The mission was launched in 2014 and is being implemented by the Urban Ministry of Housing & Poverty Alleviation.
It aims to uplift urban poor by enhancing sustainable livelihood opportunities through skill development.
It is a Centrally Sponsored Scheme.
Funding will be shared between the Centre and the States in the ratio of 75:25. For North Eastern and Special Category – the ratio will be 90:10.
Its intended beneficiaries are urban poor (street vendors, slum dwellers, homeless, rag pickers), unemployed and differently-abled.

UNDP has been working in India since 1951 in almost all areas of human development.
Together with the Government of India and development partners, it works towards eradicating poverty, reducing inequalities, strengthening local governance, enhancing community resilience, protecting the environment, supporting policy initiatives and institutional reforms, and accelerating sustainable development for all.