Ms Meera Shenoy is the Advisor to the Prime Minister on skilling, she is also Senior Advisor ,UNDP for Skilling and employment, and Founder-CEO of Youth4Jobs. Youth4Jobs focuses on helping companies hire an inclusive workforce. This includes market linked skilling and placing in organized sector jobs girls, tribals, SCs and persons with disability. They have trained 2500 persons with disabilities and placed 70% in organized sector jobs. She was awarded the NCPEDP-Shell Helen Keller award this year for being a Role model individual for increasing employment opportunities  for the disabled. McDonald also honored Youth4Jobs recently for partnering with them to help disabled get integrated in their workforce. The work has featured as a best practice by UNDP and  a World Bank study on girls and employment. Recently, she was commissioned to do the ILO country strategy for disabled and labour markets.

She worked as the World Banks’ only specialist in youth and skilling in their poverty alleviation projects of Rajasthan, Orissa ,Bihar and  Chattisgarh.  Commissioned by the state government of Orissa to develop their skilling strategy for the next five years, the strategy developed has been appreciated by the government and released by the Chief Secretary on 11th May 2012. She has written several learning notes on skilling youth for the World Bank, which was circulated globally.

Meera Shenoy was Executive Director of EGMM, the countrys’ first Jobs mission for rural and tribal youth,  which she helped set up from scratch for the Andhra Pradesh government. She changed the tone of the government skilling from trainings for trainings sake to market linked trainings for youth with placement. When she left after six years, it had become one of thelargest Jobs mission for the poor having trained 280,000 youth and placed 70% of the youth in jobs ranging from retailing to rural BPOs.  She scaled it with innovations likepro-poor products tailored to market needs – the countrys’ first grass-root English, workreadiness and Computer (EWRC)Academies. A unique  IT architecture linked to e-payment was put in place for transparency .She has given invited talksin national and international forums. Her work was featured in Knowledge@Wharton and the Wall Street Journal. The work won several awards including the South Asia Manthan award for e-inclusion. Her previous work experience is in the corporate world, and media, both print and international television.