Education India Project #1594

Make a Sustainable Place to Play in the City

by Going to School Fund

Make a Sustainable Place to Play in the City

Project Report | Sep 4, 2018
A Girl's Guide to 21st Century India

By Lisa Heydlauff | CEO

Toolkit, stories

A Girl’s Guide to 21st Century India

A Girl’s Guide is rough guide of all girls need to know to make a new life plan and make it happen, stay in school, problem solve, learn the skills they need to succeed and one day go to work or set up an enterprise of their choice.

A Girl’s Guide to 21st Century India is an offline to online toolkit designed to equip adolescent girls with the 21st Century skills they need to succeed in school and to make new life plans.

A friend once said, “The greatest tragedy is that young people in India do not have life plans. I’d like to change that.”

Inspired by his insight and digging deeper to find out how right he was, we’ve been surveying 10,000 girls to ask:

What is your life plan? What do you want to know? What must we should be in our Girl’s Guide to 21st Century India?

Girls told us that 22% of them dropout of school because their families move. Only 4/10 girls thought women should be paid the same as men. 73% of girls say they have seen violence against women and girls in the world around them. They are also bothered by the violence they see on TV. 1/6 have mobile phones and use them to call home to tell everyone where they are. You can see the complete report on www.goingtoschool.com.

Based on what they’ve suggested, we’ve designed and prototyped a Toolkit.

A Girl’s Guide is an all-in-one box, a toolkit of 20 skills stories in dynamic illustrated formats, skills challenges that enable young people to learn applied financial literacy skills, make a budget, open a bank account, manage their money online, encouraging young people to sign up and get all the paperwork they need to succeed, explore 21st Century skills such as problem-solving and making a plan, understanding sexual reproductive health choices applied to economic choices/costs, nutrition, self-defense, keeping fit, public transport, including and protecting girls, the cost of a wedding/marriage, clean energy, pollution, climate change, organic farming and sustainable enterprise, how to balance wants and needs, emotions, where to go when things go wrong, rights, laws, taxes, insurance and if they move to a city, how to make it, how to navigate and succeed. Feminist economics.

Each of the 20 challenges has a QR code that asks young people to use mobile phones or laptops to go online, log their challenge answers/data, make their new life plans, learn more, watch mini movies or animation and learn how to code.

The online component is an exceptional data collection tool for impact, enabling girls who are currently offline, when accessing the Toolkit, to go online to understand technology and explore it's ethical, safe use for information and access.

What’s the problem A Girl’s Guide wants to solve?

Education in India is not yet linked to work, enterprise or employment. Girls don’t often complete school and go to work. In the next three years 100 million young people will be on the move and in search of work. At the moment, these young people are still in Government Secondary schools and others are enrolled in skills programs in rural India. They may or may not be learning what they need to succeed and enter into a career or enterprise of their choice. Girls are most at risk from dropping out, but education’s lack of relevance to work is national and equally failing boys and young men. We’d like a chance to change that.

Young people need a chance to be able to chart new life plans and have a chance to make them come true.

We're testing A Girl's Guide from the offline to online stories and coding challenges now, in Bihar.

We'll be back with more insights into what we learn and will be hoping to rollout the toolkit in 100 government secondary schools and also, based on multiple requests, we're now hard at work building a toolkit for boys.

Have a look inside

Jun 25, 2018
The Children's Scrappy News Service Prime Time TV

By Lisa Heydlauff | Founder

Build a newsroom

It has been a longer journey than we’d expected, yet, finally, we’ve reached the top of the mountain and can see how far we’ve come. The Children’s Scrappy News Service, our original, made in India for a world of children TV show, will air on Sunday, July 1st at 4pm, on Rishtey. Rishtey is a free-to-air channel that is extremely popular in North India, with 25 to 45 million children and families tuning in to watch. We’re delighted it is a Sunday. Sunday always seemed right for a children’s TV show. The Children’s Scrappy News Service is a news-talk-game show run by kids and a robot, in a newsroom made of junk and once-loved-things, kid anchors and their guests get to the bottom of some of the biggest problems that are important to kids: Why is there no place to play? How do we get every dog a job? How do you learn how to swim if you don’t have a swimming pool? From making the switch to clean energy to recycling everything, we believe anyone can be Scrappy. For us Scrappy means to make something out of nothing to change the way things are. Scrappy TV is a prime time TV format. Every Scrappy TV show has a scrappy bot that kids can interact with to answer quiz questions and win scrappy stuff, like backpacks made of recycled things. Scrappy TV also let’s kids know about Scrappy’s APP, scrAPP where kids anywhere in the world can be a part of the movement, becoming reporters to make their own stories or joining our scrappy campaigns such as making a place to play. For schools and kids that are not online, there are scrapbooks made of recycled materials, plastic, cardboard, leaves, that kids can use to explore what is design-thinking, build their own newsrooms and create their own stories. We’re also delighted to have our first series of ‘internationally scrappy’ shows from Mexico City. If you are in India, do tune in July 1st, at 4pm, to watch the show, and every weekend after that, Saturdays and Sundays at 4pm. If you are not in India, you can see what’s happening on www.scrappynews.com, on our Facebook, Youtube and Instagram. The Children’s Scrappy News Service is an idea, concept, platform for children’s voices that we’ve been working on for over three years. Scrappy is designed to launch a nationwide conversation about the skills children should be learning at school and to give children a voice. We’d love to know what you think of Scrappy, hand on our hearts, we believe it’s the best we could do and it comes out of over 15 years of work on the ground with children in offline schools. Thank you for your belief and support. Be Scrappy.

Once loved things

Red sofa

Boxes

Links:

Scrappy News in the news

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Mar 26, 2018
Fearless girls, fantastic stories

By Olivia Elliott | Writer, content

Phulwa the mechanic

We’re often asked “How do stories work?”

We’re asked this because that’s what we do all the time, all day and all week long.

Every year, year on year, we create more stories.

I’ve been doing it for a while and so I pause, smile, shrug, hoping the silence, the space of a moment will fill the void with the swirl of remembering your favourite story ~ was it the story itself, the colors, images, or who told it? Was it who read it to you that mattered to you the most, the time of day, how you felt, or was it the story itself, or a marvelous mix of everything?

Our big goal is to make stories that children can read themselves and find their own way to make sense of the chaos of the world around them.

We can’t, unfortunately, unlike the story you were first read or remember, be there all the time to read or tell stories to children. We wish we could be.

But because we can’t be everywhere, we make stories, that can be more places than just one, two or 200 people. Stories can go very, very far.

Our art and design team, either in-house, or amazing freelance designers, work and rework images to tell stories, our team of writers, write and re-write in English and Hindi and test, test again, trying to come up with a story that in the end, inspires a young person, a girl, to want to finish it, a story that makes her want to come to school next week again and the week after that…

One of our all-time most successful stories we’ve ever made is one of the two graphic novels that Somesh Kumar made for us: Phulwa the Mechanic.

Phulwa is a young girl mechanic in rural Bihar. She cycles everywhere on her pink bicycle and as she races through her village she sees two challenges ~ the traditional roles of girls and women where she lives + the fact that no one has electricity all day long. She puts both challenges together to find a solution: she builds a biomass enterprise to keep the lights on.

Year on year it’s the most popular story in our program. We still can’t put on fingers on exactly why, “Why exactly does Phulwa’s story work?”

We know it’s a big hit with girls and with boys who now think girls run clean energy enterprises everywhere, just like that, they don’t just believe, they know its possible.

But then again, as every story is remade again by the reader, perhaps you too can tell us what makes a story work, we’d love to hear your story.

Phulwa and the light

Phulwa finds out more

Phulwa makes a plan

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