Project: Catalysing Impact First Entrepreneurship to create Dignified Jobs for the Poor in India
State of development: Current
Stage of development: Early stage
Stage notes: Early-Stage Design
Type of instrument — Impact Bond: No; Outcomes Fund: No; Social Impact Incentives (SIINC): No; Social Impact Guarantee: No; Payment-by-results (no pre-financing): No; Technical Assistance and Market-building program: No; Other: 
Rationale for using outcome-based finance: "While SIINC as an innovative finance model has been designed and implemented in few places, embedding the model into a collaborative makes it truly innovative, converging investors of varied ticket sizes and instruments towards one outcome of creating dignified jobs for the poor and underserved. The collaborative also makes it cost effective for everyone. Working through a collaboration of 7 investors gives in-built scale and spreadability for this approach. More powerful than working with one org alone. 
The quality jobs index that will be developed along with 60 decibels will provide a clear benchmark for the sector to build on and calculate incentives linked to outcomes. Once demonstrated, the model is easily replicable in other geographies, specially southeast Asia and Africa."
Key challenges to launch: "Design Funding: We are facing the chicken and egg problem with the project of not being able to secure an outcome funderâs commitment until the program is designed and scoped. And not having funds to design the OBF project taking technical advice from specialists to design the incentives structure. Early stage design funding, will help us secure outcome funder's commitment and move forward. 

Network: We have limited visibility into potential outcome funders and the accelerator will be truly additional to help us open up our networks with mission aligned organisations, who are willing to commit to the cause of economic inclusion by creating high quality jobs for the poor.

Knowledge: We need to connect and validate our insights with existing knowledge hubs to deepen the understanding and optimise results and we look forward to the accelerator's support in making this possible."
Social/developmental challenge: Inequitable economic growth: India's rapid economic and technological growth has not proven inclusive. According to the World Inequality Report 2022, the bottom 50% of Indian households own only 6% of the total wealth in the country. The top 10% and 1% own, respectively, 65% and 33% of the total wealth. 

Majorly informal workforce: In India, 10 percent of the population lives on less than $2.15 per day and nearly 90 percent of employment is informal with unreliable income streams, unsafe work environments, and inadequate social protections.

SGBs are considered uninvestable: While SGBs are the largest job creators in India, they fall into the 'missing middle': too large for microfinance but too small, unproven, or risky for traditional investments. 

Twofold challenge: connecting more people in extreme poverty with dignified work to break the cycle, and supporting businesses that bring stability and safety to sectors that otherwise rely on informal employment.
Expected intervention model: "The project will incentivise Small and Growing Businesses (SGBs) in India for creating dignified jobs for the poor and underserved. We will design a standardized incentive model, leveraging data from our ongoing benchmarking study with 60 Decibels on quality of jobs. We will build on learnings from Upayaâs 35+ investments in SGBs in India in the past 12 years. This incentivized model will be implemented and scaled through Upaya's initiative, Dignified Jobs Collaborative, which currently has 7 investor partners, namely- Acumen, Ankur Capital, Beyond Capital Fund, Elea Foundation, Yunus Social Business, S3IDF and Upaya Social Ventures. 
SGBs create 60% of new jobs in emerging markets, largely informal, profoundly impacting livelihoods and economies. In 2021, SGBs in India mobilized $6.8 Bn in investments. India's impact investing industry is recording a year on year growth of approximately 21% and is expected to grow exponentially by 2030. Impact investors must commit to creating high quality, not just high quantity, jobs for the poor. Investors must also mitigate any negative impacts in jobs being created including checking on exploitative employment practices. This can only be achieved through a commonly accepted metric of job quality contextualized in emerging markets to allow for outcomes verification."
Policy sectors — Employment and private sector development: Yes; Education: No; Social protection: No; Criminal justice: No; Health: No; Agriculture: No; Environment and climate change: No; Water, Sanitation and Hygiene: No; Energy: No; Humanitarian: No; Early Childhood Education: No; Other: 
Primary SDG goal: 1,8
Country income classification of beneficiaries — Low-income: No; Lower-middle-income: Yes; Upper-middle-income: No; High-income: No
Notes: Data for this pipeline project was last updated in March 2024
Delivery location: India