Growing Livelihood Opportunities for Women
GLOW's Approach to Industry Selection
Home healthcare, logistics, and flexi-staffing emerged as high potential industries to create 100,000 jobs for women in India.


GLOW used two criteria for selecting the three business models.
Overview
GLOW shortlisted the home healthcare, logistics, and flexi-staffing industries based on three criteria: potential to create large number of jobs, leverages women’s capabilities, and aligns with women’s employment needs. We evaluated 18 business models and deprioritized 15 of them, as the employment potential for women or business model viability was unclear.
Key Insights on Selection of the Three Industries
- Creating regular jobs for women helps increase women’s participation sustainably as compared to skilling or boosting self-employment
- Skilling: While it increases employability and opportunities for self-advancement, skilling a lot of individuals when the market has few job opportunities to offer might lead to wage stagnation. Approximately 0.4m jobs are created annually for nearly 1.9m individuals entering the labor force each year[1]
- Self-employment: Women may not prefer self-employment due to the uncertain and low earnings (e.g., 90 percent of self-employed women earn less than USD 135 per month[2])
- Regular jobs: Women often prefer regular, fixed-wage jobs over risky entrepreneurship opportunities[3]
- Organized home healthcare, which is the provision of healthcare services at home (e.g., post-hospital care), has the potential to create roughly 34,000[4] jobs for women over the next 5–7 years. The industry is expected to grow at 19 percent CAGR over the next 7 years
- Logistics, involving involving the transport and storage of the parcel from the seller to the end-consumer, has the potential to employ approximately 11m workers by 2030.[5] The industry is growing at approximately 10.5%[6] per annum fueled by rapid expansion of ecommerce in India
- Flexi-staffing companies, which involves the provision of semi-skilled frontline employees (e.g., retail promoters, tele-calling agents) to companies, are expected to create approximately 12m jobs in India by 2030[7] The growth is fueled by large companies increasingly wanting to outsource non-core activities (e.g., recruitment, compliance management)
[1] NSSO / PLFS data for 2004–05 and 2017–18
[2] Mint 2019, ‘Stark reality of the self-employed’
[4] Grand View Research 2020, ‘India HHC Market Estimates and Trend Analysis report’
[5] Grand View Research 2020, ‘India HHC Market Estimates and Trend Analysis report’
[6] ICC 2020, Logistics and Supply Chain Sector
[7] ISF 2019, ‘Impact of key reforms on job formalization’

