Taaron Ki Toli
MLC Voyager | Created by Breakthrough Trust
Breakthrough is working to create a gender transformative education system to shape a new generation of gender equal citizens who will gradually transform the norms that perpetuate violence and discrimination against women and girls and create gender equal communities where girls are valued and are free to make their choices.
852,617 Lives Impacted
Breakthrough’s interventions have been thoroughly tested in different contexts with evidence indicating significant shifts in gender attitudes and behaviours of boys and girls, particularly perceptions around girls’ education and employment in an RCT by J-PAL, South Asia, for the TkT programme in Haryana, covering 14,000 adolescents across 314 schools. In the second checkpoint three years later, adolescent attitudes remained progressive (15.5% over control). RCT by CMS in Bihar indicated girls were 89% more likely to be enrolled in school if they were part of Breakthrough’s programme. Early marriage declined by 28% in our programme compared to 22% in control areas.
Evaluation by NRMC covering 7 districts of U.P indicated:
Girls’ age at marriage increased by 1 year, 11 months from baseline to endline
Decrease in adolescent drop-out by 6 percentage points despite the impact of Covid-19
Intergenerational dialogues between adolescent girls and their families increased by 17.8%
Breakthrough is poised to create a more gender transformative education system, which is empathetic and responsive to the needs of adolescent girls and ensures that adolescents reach their full potential. They do this by partnering with state governments to scale up so as to reach marginalised young people across the country. Their work aims to:
Ensure incorporation of a gender lens into government school syllabi
Build a strong training delivery mechanism for teachers to create more gender equitable classrooms
Sensitisation and capacity building of the administrative staff in the education department to bring gender into their discourse
Drive parental engagement with schools.
The Innovation
Taaron ki Toli (TKT) is a school-based program for adolescent girls and boys (aged 11 to 14) in grades six to eight, which aims to change gender attitudes, aspirations, and behaviours of students that sustain gender inequalities. The curriculum is designed to develop the psychological, interpersonal, and social skills of adolescents and uses games, songs, drawing, and other activities to discuss topics such as gender stereotypes, gender roles at home, girls’ education, women’s employment outside the home, and harassment. Taaron Ki Toli has helped to incorporate a gender lens into middle school subject curricula based on the contextual needs of the region. The curriculum was accompanied with training modules for teachers, school leaders and officers to build overall gender sensitivity and develop the capacity to deliver the curriculum.
Breakthrough Trust ensures sensitisation of the school administrators to become capable of mentoring teachers on changing adolescent attitudes and mindsets by working closely with the education officials. Additionally, Breakthrough works to enhance parental engagement with the school by designing, planning and executing targeted messages to influence parents engagement with the school and raise awareness of the need for gender equity.
Taaron Ki Toli is the only innovation seeking to shift regressive social norms that perpetuate violence against women and girls through a localised, intersectional lens to ensure that the specific issues of particular states are addressed through the intervention. Additionally, the field staff is recruited from local communities in order to have a nuanced understanding of local culture. They rely strongly on evidence in implementation of programmes: creating models of transformation, testing them rigorously, and then choosing to scale up once there is concrete demonstration of impact. They also use the “Me to We approach” by engaging young people as the principal stakeholder in order to bring transformation first at the personal level, leading to change in families, then in communities, and finally in society at large.
About Breakthrough Trust
Breakthrough was founded in 1999 in order to address the issue of violence against women and girls by making use of culture to change culture, and acknowledging that social norms are the key to changing how women and girls in India experience their lives. Breakthrough's mission is to work towards making violence and discrimination against women and girls unacceptable. We do this by transforming the underlying cultural norms that perpetuate regressive practices. We envision a world in which all people enjoy their human rights and live with dignity, equality and justice.
