Every 4th girl is a child bride. Help change this

Dear Donor,

Breakthrough’s Adolescent Empowerment Programme (AEP) in Gaya district, Bihar is largely modelled to promote sexual and reproductive health rights of women and girls and gender equitable norms from the early stages of life over.

We focused on conducting our baseline evaluation to gather necessary insights that guided our programme implementation. Our key accomplishments during this reporting period were:

• Identified and selected intervention GPs and Schools: 15 Gram Panchayats (GPs) have been identified in coordination with district team. We also identified 30 schools for our intervention in these 15 GPs. The school based intervention is a critical part of the programme as it aims to improve the understanding of 11-14 year-old adolescents about their rights, Gender based Violence (GBV) and safe spaces. This will form the foundation for building egalitarian attitudes and relationships between boys and girls, promote agency, build self-worth and develop their negotiation skills.
• Orientated Principals and Teachers: The program team visited all the schools in 15 GPs to collect information about schools, students, build rapport with school administrations and get their consent to run school based Taaron Ki Toli program with 11-14 yrs in schools. The program team then oriented the school teachers & principals about the project. All the school administrations have given their assurance to support the school-based interventions in their respective schools. The school based interventions in the selected schools will commence in new academic sessions in Apr’19 to Mar’20 after the summer vacation.
• Formed older adolescent groups in communities (Kishori Mandals): Our work in the past has highlighted an emergent need to focus on the age group between 15-18 years and inclusion of men and boys in the dialogue to promote gender equality and reduce VAWG. For this, the team visited all the Aaganwadi Centres in intervention GPs and found out the status of adolescents in their respective areas. With the support of Aaganwadi workers and other key stakeholders of the community, we initiated the kishori Mandal formation process, where these adolescent girls were oriented about the project. We formed 22 Kishori Mandals, consisting of 454 members. We facilitated a session called Jaan Pahchan Ho (Let’s get to know each other). This introductory session helps set their expectations from the sessions and clarify their role in the sessions. The lesson has been completed with 431 adolescents in 15 kishori Mandals. The team will complete the formation process of 8 remaining kishori Mandals by end of June’2019 and complete the sessions with them as well.
• Formed Convergence Group: Formation of Convergence group is a significant step for us to understanding the socio-cultural context of each community and adapting the programme according to it. Convergence group members (PRIs, AWWs, Sahiya, Asha, Men Group, SHGs, etc.) are aware of the community-specific issues and Breakthrough works with them to provide technical understanding and tools to address these issues. We have formed convergence group in all 15 GPs that also include government officials. This also helps build sustainability of the program as the members of these convergence groups take the ownership of the issue and take action.
• Conducted Social Mapping: Social Mapping helps map the existing resources and understand the social landscape of every community. This helps us strategize our interventions according to the local context. During the reporting, our first touchpoint with the community convergence group was through social mapping. 8 social mapping exercises were undertaken in 8 revenue villages. A total of 317 people participated in the social mapping activities, including 149 adolescents from 8 kishori mandals. The district team and community people together created the map of the village marking all streets, roads, resources, houses, school, AWC, VHND, etc. in the village. Once the map was completed, the adolescent girls & boys helped in marking houses where adolescent girls are there. The process also brought out how discrimination leads to unfair resource allocation. For example, during the mapping, the community members realised that all major resources like schools, Aaganwadi centres, water pumps were located near communities where upper caste families resided. SC/ST/OBC families had to depend on schools to get water. These social maps will now help in working on the strategy and action plan for all these convergence groups in future. Additionally, adolescents are now aware of the existing resources in their communities that they can access.
• Strengthening Liasoning with Line Departments in District: During the reporting period, our networking efforts were concentrated on building rapport with the officials from Education and Health Department. Officials from both departments have assured their support for the programme. The district team has submitted the request letter to DEOs office and they are in process of releasing a permission letter to conduct TkT sessions in schools. The DEO and Sarv Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) officer also invited Breakthrough to participate in School Management Committee (SMC) meetings on regular basis. This will help us ensure that SMCs focus on making schools a safe for adolescents.

We can't thank YOU enough for your support, please feel free to write to us if you have any query or need any specific information.

Thanks and Regards,

Aman Chhabra.