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Education of Adolescent Girls in Rural Uttar Pradesh, India

My Experiences at Kasturba Gandhi Girl’s Residential Schools (2006-10) administered by Mahila Samakhya.

Key Learnings

• Women empowerment is a critical and enabling condition for adolescent girls’ education.

• Teacher empowerment is a key process. • Enabling institutional structure is necessary for program contextualization and

wider impact.

 Slide-Map

Slide 1-2 – Discuss Mahila Samakhya and Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidhyalaya Scheme Slide 4-7 – Discuss context and inequalities faced by adolescent girls and women Slide 8 – Discuss teacher selection Slide 9-18 – Discuss teacher orientation and its course design Slide 19 – Discuss strengths Slide 20 – Video Slide 21 – Discuss challenges Slide 22-23 – Key Learnings

The experiences that I’m honored to share today are located in the rural school sector

of Uttar Pradesh, India. The state of Uttar Pradesh, with a population of 170 million, is

not only India’s largest state but also it is equal to world’s tenth largest country by

population. This state has around 160,000 government elementary schools and

540,000 teachers (Flash Statistics, DISE 2013-14).

Kasturba Gandhi Girls’ Residential Schools (KGBV) were established and administered

by a women’s only gender-specific institution in India called Mahila Samakhya (MS).

The focus of MS is on community-based women's education and empowerment. My

experience with KGBVs indicated that due to social and economic factors in India, it

was indeed difficult to empower and educate adolescent girls without the support of

such institutions. The role of a women’s only institution, such as, MS in this regard is

twofold. First the institution constructs relevant forms of knowledge that is required to

drive the empowerment process for adolescent girls and women.

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Times of India, 2007 National Daily Editorial by Prof Krishna Kumar Former Director NCERT, New Delhi, India

 

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Secondly, it becomes a catalyst for creating a critical mass of understanding and

perspective in the broader community around them to support the empowerment

process. As a result poor rural adolescent girls and women successfully emerge from the

program with radically changed equity-based self-confidence and energy. Based on this my first thesis is that the outcome of the program showed that the implementation of KGBV schools within the context of gender-specific community-based intervention under MS was effective.

MS was founded under the National Policy on Education, 1986, which stated that

women empowerment was a critical pre-condition for the effective participation of

women in the education process. The policy recognized the deeply entrenched

psychosocial biases for gender inequality in the culture. It redefined education as an

enabling and empowering tool and as a process that would enable women to “think

critically, to question, to analyze their own condition, to demand and acquire the

information and skills they need to enable them to plan and act collectively for change.”

MS relies on a philosophy of community development and transformational social

change by infusing feminist energy in women’s groups that can slowly dismantle the

psychosocial foundations of gender imbalance. MS depends on non-government

employees. The program actively recruits women from inaccessible and impoverished

rural areas as potential pupils for education as well as its future employees. It prepares

them for empowerment work in their respective communities. The role of project

functionaries is facilitative, not directive. It supports women to determine the form,

nature, content and timing of all the activities in their village.

The program initiates itself by setting up dialogues with women on context-specific

issues. Such issues include various social and political structures of power and their

impact on people and processes, distribution of resources, and forces causing

marginalization of people, especially, females. The Program has multiple entry points

that depend upon the need and urgency of the community. The empowerment

curriculum is designed around a selected priority area. For example, if the prime

concern of women is managing water crisis for domestic use, then the core curriculum

and vocabulary will be designed around how to manage scarcity of water.

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Under the umbrella of this program gender-experts share their experiences,

information, analyses as well as data processing. This helps women identify social

structures that produce patriarchy, gender-inequality, and exclusion. In fact, the

content, process and implementation design of the program attempt to bring about a

change in a woman’s relationship with her own body, self and more broadly her

relationship with environment, community and with other social and political

institutions.

MS nurtures deliberative processes and an environment that create bonding among

women based on common and critical awareness of their marginalization in social,

political and economic structures. In such a setting, a group with continuous

empowerment processes consolidates as a collective, where women feel safe to ask

questions, to challenge gender-specific norms and traditions of inequality, to raise their

voice against social discrimination and injustice and to speak fearlessly about

themselves. There is substantial evidence that women value being part of these

collectives known as Sanghas (Assembly) in Hindi. This supportive environment, new

understanding and group cohesion improve women’s confidence levels and create a

sense of self in wider context. It imbues them with the energy to analyze their situation

and to raise their voice to alter their position from subordination to that of choice and

dignity. Thus claiming equality and due rights. If we name this new found energy as

feminism, it brings a laser-like focus among women for their equality and empowerment

to end violence of all forms against them. Many a times this could cause women to get

in conflict with their own family norms and other social structures of power.

Examples:

Experiencing Empowerment

“My husband first stopped me to go to the meetings. I told him: whether you agree or

not, I will go. Awareness and understanding do not come at home, from inside the

house, we will have to go somewhere to learn … If you can go to your work, then I can

go to my meetings.” –- A case study of Mahila Samakhya Programme in Khajooraho

Village Uttar Pradesh India. Master’s thesis, University of Amsterdam, Joni Van de Sand,

October 2007.

“I will not do the fasting as I find no clue how my fasting can prolong my husband’s

life…if in any way this is true, then my life is also as precious as his, so he too should do

the fasting for me.” — Vibha Sahyogini (Village level MS worker), Sitapur Uttar Pradesh,

India, 2006

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My second thesis is that KGBV schools were successful in all those contexts where similar kind of educational philosophy and critical pedagogy was followed to empower and prepare teachers. The emphasis

during teacher selection and preparation was less on mastery of subject content and

more on imbibing perspectives on gender equity and understanding of structures,

norms and processes that lead to marginalization of females and restriction of learning

opportunities for them. The pedagogical approach during teacher preparation

concentrated on infusing them with the similar feminist energy as was present in MS

Sangha women. Because only then the teachers could teach the KGBV students with

the same pedagogical approach of equity. The aim was to develop teaching-learning

methods and content that would raise critical thinking, abilities to solve problems, and

help end marginalization of women.

We observed that teachers as well as the community had subjective expectations from

education, schools and children. These expectations differed by religion, by caste and

by gender of the child. In order to counter these subjective expectations and to

increase opportunities for equitable experience, there was constant effort on making

KGBV schools caste-free, class-free and ritual-free. Every day MS was experiencing what

worked and what got into conflict with the ideals of equality. For example, during

morning school assembly prayer, the posture of eyes-closed with folded hands was

reflected upon from various perspectives of girls’ safety as well as religious sensitivities.

The unmindful usage of local terminologies such as “Achhe Ghar ke Bachhe” (Children

from good families with the term “good” used for upper castes), “Neech jaat ke

bachhe” (Children from lowly castess, having a connotation of not being fit for school

education) was explained to underscore the kind of belief system these terms

perpetuated and how these impacted our behavior as well as the expectations from the

child.

Apart from issues of gender and caste, we also realized that certain key terms in school

sector had acquired an extremely tired meaning over the years, carried little sense and

encouraged no action. The question was how we could add fresh sensitivities and

reciprocities between the language and the action. This required deeper reflection and

unlearning of certain beliefs that were giving rise to fatigue in actions.

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Example

Terms Tired meaning New meaning

School Physical structure Community of learners

Teacher Adult authority to instruct

children

Builds up curiosity in the

mind and facilitates to

explore

Children Recipients of instructions,

to be disciplined and

taught

Young people requiring

care, respect, capable of

learning, have their own

styles to learn

Teaching Transfer of knowledge A mutual learning process

Joyful teaching Not doing anything, letting

children on their own

Participation in the leaning

process

Learning Rote learning/Good

memory

A process of constructing

knowledge

Knowledge Textbooks Multiple sources & diverse

forms

Examination Means to Pass or Fail

children

Feedback for teachers

about child’s progress

Contextualization Use of local material Meaningful to real-life

situation

Community Parents A social unit with common

values with its past, present

and a perspective on future

The tool that was used was critical thinking questions and discussions to discover the

relationship between current meaning, its impact on processes, and learning outcomes.

The aim was to create clarity of purpose, thoughts and feelings around students, schools

and processes that could empower and transform adolescent girls in rural context  

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Example:

Innovations towards Education for Empowerment, Published by Best Practices Foundation. DFID India and Government of India, 2010

 

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 My third thesis is that for a change to sustain and be carried forward effectively, the structure of such programs needs to evolve as fast as the evolution of its workers and its targets. In the last 30 years since the establishment

of MS, the program has grown in its coverage. It has created a significant impact on the

lives of women, who have worked in the program as its employees, as Sangha members,

as pupils or as teachers. Its sole dependence on altruistic labor to help poor women

overcome their marginalized position in society needs to be reflected upon. This is more

important as India, even in its rural villages, is experiencing deep impact of market-driven

economy and changing role of state over the lives of people and programs. Despite

apparent success in the empowerment of women and adolescents girls in most wretched

circumstances, gender-specific programs such as MS remain marginalized in the state

policy discourse related to issues of gender justice and women empowerment. In the

absence of political will for women empowerment, an effective state action or

government policy to strengthen such programs is rarely visible.

In spite of ongoing challenges and deprivations, these gender-specific programs have

constructed enormous wealth of knowledge in diverse forms in their own languages and

expressions with immense potential to solve most complex social problems. With

accumulated experience of several decades, these programs have built a repertoire of

culturally sensitive practices and strategies for initiating process of women empowerment,

education and perspective on change. They have created a body of knowledge huge

enough to merit attention of scholars and universities for the expansion of their scope in

theory and application.

There is potential within these institutions for providing policy directions on issues of

development. However, my own experience reminds me of continuing struggle such

organizations face every day to find a voice in state forums on issues, where their voice

would be the only authentic voice.

My work on how to bring gender-specific programs and their workers in the mainstream

of public policy discourse on education and development continues.

Rashmi Sinha