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Photo by Internal Team
ECOSYSTEMS FOR GIRLS
For over two decades, our alliances with agrarian families and government schools across India brought us into close contact with India’s girls.
Despite carrying marks of early hardship and societal pressures, each girl held an iridescent glimmer of hopes and dreams in her eyes. Every girl has this right to dream. Every girl deserves to attend school, to access academic support, to enjoy health, to advocate for her rights, and to take up opportunities which allow her to blossom with confidence and live a dignified life of her choosing.
This vision, this wish, manifested in Project Nanhi Kali – Nanhi Kali meaning little bud in Hindi, as we believe every girl is a bud waiting to flower.
In partnership with K.C. Mahindra Education trust since 2005, we jointly managed this project to create ecosystems of social and academic support around girls from tribal, rural, and urban backgrounds as they complete their first 10 years of schooling.
These ecosystems, established on a community-level, mobilise a cadre of young women who mentor the girls and inspire their courage to overcome cultural, familial, or socioeconomic circumstances which hinder their completion of schooling.
By ensuring the girls have access to study materials, dignity kits, sports programmes, and digital literacy, we reinforce their learning with habits and tools which build independence, self confidence, and physical strength.
Hosting one of India’s largest annual sporting events for girls – Toofaan Games (Photo by Adithya Narayan)
A VOICE FOR TEENAGE GIRLS
Our work with girl livelihoods evoked pressing questions – what is life like for a teenage girl in India? How dignified and safe does she feel? Does she have access to education, sanitation, and sports? What are her fears and aspirations?
With no clear answers to these questions in national databases, we decided to collect our own data by surveying 74,000 teenage girls from households across 30 states of India.
Listening to diverse voices of these girls and sharing them through our TAG Report filled us with concerns for their future but also hopes for the possibility of transforming their circumstances.
As the first of its kind in India, perhaps the world, our TAG Index provides a glimpse of how each state is performing on the status of its teenage girls. We hope for this Index to be used in present and future discourses of policymakers, researchers, and civilians.
Photo by Kamal Sahai
MAKING GIRLS JOB READY
India’s girls carry an untapped potential to bolster the socioeconomic advancement and cultural progression of the nation at large. To champion the dreams and aspirations of girls and young women in a world that is constantly evolving, we shaped a national framework of job readiness programmes.
Extending across 428 districts and 21 states, these programmes equip and encourage women to open doors into the workforce and step through with confidence in their own capacity.
Our skilling areas, carefully chosen after consulting experts and industry leaders, encompass agriculture, education technology, digital marketing, coding, and IT-enabled services, aligning with market demands and industrial trends.
But that’s not all; we go beyond the technicalities.
We nurture skills in teamwork, leadership, and English communication, moulding these capabilities into entrepreneurial qualities and pathways to self-driven prosperity.
Led by a vision of livelihood security for women, we recruit a network of over 650 faculty who underpin the active scripting of a story of India’s new generation of women, moving forward with resilience and determination.
Photo by Nevin John