By Lisa Heydlauff | CEO
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.
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