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Sonu Iyer: Hello and welcome to a special edition of EY India Insights podcast series, to celebrate and showcase remarkable women leaders. I am Sonu Iyer, your host today, and the Executive Sponsor for DEI at EY in India. It is a privilege and honor to host a remarkable woman leader who stands out for her passion and commitment to create a more inclusive and equitable society for people with disabilities.

Let me introduce Meera Shenoy. She is the founder of Youth4Jobs and an inspiring woman leader who is steadily pushing the agenda for inclusivity and diversity. 

Meera set up and led one of India's first skilling mission - Employment Generation Marketing Mission (EGMM), for rural and tribal youth for the Andhra Pradesh government, which demonstrated that rural and tribal youth, if skilled to the needs of the market, can improve opportunities. EGMM influenced policy and went on to impact multiple lives. This was followed by working in the poverty alleviation projects of World Bank across Southeast Asia. Her recent assignment was as Senior Advisor, Skilling and Employment at UNDP, supporting Mr. Subramanian Ramadorai, advisor to the Prime Minister on skilling.

She brings to her work a unique combination of understanding the community, markets, and government. She has won several national and international awards. She writes books, conducts annual abilities photography channel, and has just set up the first center of mindfulness for disability.

A very warm welcome to you, Meera. Thank you for making the time for this podcast.

Meera: It is a pleasure to be here, Sonu. 

Sonu: Meera, what inspired you to launch Youth4Jobs and how do you think it has helped change the face of availability of jobs for people with disabilities?

Meera: When I set up Youth4Jobs, I was clear that I wanted to work with marginalized youth and markets because when you catch them at say, 20, you can influence them for the next 50 years of their lives. My previous work clearly showed this. Then I saw the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) statistics, which said that 80% of the world's disability population lives in developing countries like India. I asked myself, if that is true, can I once again produce a model for scale in this very marginalized community for the country? Hence, the vision is that every youth with disability should be confident, independent and have a sustained livelihood. 

Government offices quite often tell me what can be more beautiful than a job for youth with disability. That is really true, because the impact of a job is not just economic empowerment; it is far beyond – the person moves from being a liability to an asset, brings quite often the highest salary home and so equations change in the community. Also, studies show that if you give a job or a sustained livelihood to one youth with disability, it takes the entire family out of poverty in a very sustained manner. That is our mantra, and that is what personally drives me to do this work.

Sonu: Thank you for sharing that, Meera. Let us hear more about women entrepreneurs with disabilities and your passion to work for them. 

Meera: There are 300 million women with disabilities globally; they are three times less educated than men with disabilities; they are highly under-represented in decision making; they have no voice in their communities. Yet, no one has worked in this segment, not even those who work in (the area of) gender (equality), because of neglect of these intersectional issues.

It was surprising to me. This issue came into the spotlight during COVID, when our call center received innumerable calls from women with disabilities – young widows, young mothers with children – all of whom said they wanted some money in their pockets. When we asked what we could do for them, they asked us to provide training to them in the afternoon, which we did. 

We also conducted an impact survey, and the results turned out to be amazing. On every indicator, the condition of these women improved, including reduced sexual exploitation. But that was not enough, I felt. We started doing more things with our partner Zero Project, which is among the world's most prestigious conferences for the disabled. It has a footprint in about 180 countries with about 6,000 experts, and the focus is on innovations. We have been their partner for 10 years to bring the Zero conference to India. Last year, during the Zero conference in India, I launched WE DO, an entrepreneur enterprise initiative for women with disabilities. 

The hope is: one, to begin with what is already there for gender and to see how we can build platforms, generate funds and to see whether we can mainstream women with disabilities into the existing gender platforms, to make them understand that these are the most marginalized in gender. And then to look at new work, which is working with the Self-help Affinity Groups (SAGs), where you partner with government and various other stakeholders. They are so invisible that I am really surprised. For example, we brought out a small booklet on case studies of women entrepreneurs with disabilities from India, and we really had to work so hard to get 20 good case studies. The idea is how do you shift them from being invisible to visible? The program will evolve. We have already talked about some things like launching an award. We are bringing out our next booklet of case studies of women entrepreneurs with disabilities in South Asian countries.

The idea is to slowly inch forward and in a very pioneering manner, make sure that women entrepreneurs with disabilities also come to the center stage.

Sonu: That is fascinating, Meera. What challenges did you encounter and how did you successfully overcome them to navigate ahead in this journey? 

Meera: I faced many difficulties. We had decided that we should do what India needs. So, we thought we will work first with youth with disabilities who are from the villages of India and have less education, to see how we can get them the right skills and employed. 

It was not easy. You go to villages, you find youth, but where are the disabled? We did not realize that in companies not everyone understands disability. There were innumerable challenges. In fact, I thought at some point in time that I was biting more than I could chew.

I traveled across the country talking to two kinds of people – youth with disabilities who were successful entrepreneurs, and CEOs and Chairpersons, who had hired youth with disabilities. That became the book, which was launched at the Jaipur festival. So, it has been a journey. When we found that corporates were not hiring because they did not understand disability, we launched a series of low-cost services for them, and added more services as we moved along. 

When our corporate network increased, companies started asking us for educated youth with disabilities, so we started the ‘College Connect’ program. Then we saw that the educational institutions do not understand disability, so we started a sensitizing program for them. 

When we won the MIT award, the judges told us that now you have a control over supply and demand, so you should start a job platform for youth with disability. That is when we set up ‘Swaraj Ability’ - India's first AI triggered a completely accessible job platform for youth with disabilities. It is one of the largest investments made in this space. We have about 1,100 companies now registered, even though the platform is only about 10 months young. 

What is happening is through our new products, whether it is WE-Do or Swaraj Ability, Youth4Jobs, which is now a 12-year-old organization, is slowly shifting from being a skilling organization to a system changer, where we are working with youth beyond us. We work with NGOs, governments, companies, associations, and educational institutions to change the systems and to help them (youth with disabilities) get sustained livelihood. We are going through a really nice transition, and the whole thing has evolved on its own so smoothly because we keep one eye on the community and one eye on the markets.

Sonu: Meera, that is very impressive. Just hearing about GenAI being used and you are getting corporate India also to support you in this extremely important purpose from a nation building perspective, is very impressive. If I were to know you as a person, how would you describe yourself, and what motivates you?

Meera: ‘Impact at scale’ motivates me. The more marginalized the youth, the higher is the impact of sustained livelihood on their lives. We see it every single day and that really drives our work. Recently, in a meeting I asked my team how many of them would jump with joy every day to do their work because of the impact, how many love it or how many like it. I was happy to see that almost 75% of our people jumped with joy. Every one of them experiences how parents (of the marginalized youth) cry and come to them saying the “useless” child has a job now and they can die in peace. The impact on girls is magical, which is why we really love our work.

Sonu: That is very impressive. So, impact, scale, collaboration – they really are qualities that stand out in the entire body of work that you have done thus far in your journey. How do you motivate other women who want to get on to this social journey, who want to become social entrepreneurs like you, who want to be the catalyst for change in our society, in our communities? What would you say to those women and men? 

Meera: There is a thriving world out there and there is a wilting world out there. It is a small quirk of fate that we have been born in the thriving world. The need for everyone is to shift focus from ‘me’ to ‘we.’ It is just shifting of one letter, but it is not so easy. We need to stop being obsessed with our own challenges, our own problems. Everyone has problems, but if you shift your focus to the more marginalized who need support, your own problems become smaller. And it is only if you shift your focus from ‘me’ to ‘we’, together, that we can leave behind a beautifully inclusive world.

Sonu: What a powerful note to end on – shift the focus from ‘me’ to ‘we’ – and we can leave behind a legacy that everyone will be proud of. Thank you so much, Meera Shenoy, for joining us today on our podcast. It was a real pleasure having you. 

Meera: It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Sonu.

Sonu: So that is the wrap on our first episode of this special edition of EY India Insights podcast, where we want to be able to bring to you various women who are shaping the landscape in our country today. Come back for another episode soon. Stay tuned.

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