Make a Sustainable Place to Play in the City

A Boy’s Guide and A Girl’s Guide to 21^st Century India are bilingual (Hindi and English), interactive, student-friendly offline-online toolkits containing individual, original, print-ready stories and tools that address essential life skills for boys and girls aged 12-17. The stories are mini books, each one designed to enable young people to explore 21^st Century skills, understand their bodies, love and life choices in the context of their lives and where they live in the world with the hope, a map, a way to draft new life/career/enterprise plans through this content. The Girl’s and Boy's Guide bag of stories were created following months of meticulous and assiduous research and testing with a lot of young people to see what they wanted to know, learn, the problems they wanted to solve and what they wanted to do differently when they were 18 and have completed school.

Each printed mini book asks children to compelte a practical challenge, following a design-thinking approach to enable children to identify problems that affect their communities and think of business-based solutions that will solve these problems in a sustainable way taking into account the Climate Crisis gripping the planet.

As part of the research, we took the bags of stories to 100 schools in Bihar. Testing gave us interesting feedback from young people. For example, Mohammed reacted positively to the Sanitary Pad book in the Boy’s Guide kit. He and his friends Deven, Ghulam and Adnan said that now, by reading the book, they understand that life is different for girls. They said they learned many things for the first time, they now know what periods and sanitary pads are. They want to show this book to their mothers and sisters so that they can know about the health benefit of using sanitary pads. After reading the book they said that they now understand that girls must use sanitary pads instead of cloth because it is hygienic and good for their health. They also noted with empathy that girls and women must go through more physical pain than boys and men.

And for the notes from girls, Mehzabee was fascinated about about the benefits of using sanitary pads. But she had never heard about tampons and was glad to know what they are and how to use them. Nibha and Muskan wanted to show the sanitary pad story to their sisters. For Savita, it was a revelation that it is important for people, especially girls, to wear a helmet when riding their bicycles. After reading the book about 'being on time', Manisha says she and her friends were often late for things and that they didn't realise women shoudl be paid for a lot of the work they do. Manisha thought the correlation between time + work and money was interesing and she said she'd try to be ontime tomorrow to school.