Abhivyanjana

Project Abhivyanjana aims at improving the quality of life of Adolescent Girls by creating a sustainable two-way communication network that enables them to understand their social development issues and advocate for policy level changes by expressing their concerns using different media platforms at national, state and local level. Project ‘Abhivyanjana’ (expression), aims at enhancing the leadership skills among adolescent girls (aged 14-20) from underserved communities from border villages of Bikaner district in Rajasthan. The intervention region is an extremely marginalized region with poor human development indicators specially for young girls and women. Inhabited by a mixed population, this area is close to the international border and stands as an outlier from the development ambit of the country. In this media-dark zone, struggle of the communities to participate in the development process of the country remains disconnected from the policy makers. Situation of young girls and women is even worse as the social-economical-political fabric of this region doesn’t even consider their existence – veiled both literally, and metaphorically!

Project Abhivyanjana will strengthen the understanding of AGs on gender & development, building their confidence to challenge and transform the gender inequitable attitudes that hinders their participation in country’s development. In addition to information and knowledge, Charkha will conduct skill-building workshops to provide young girls from these border villages with a platform to raise their voices through the creative use of media. They will write articles, poems, make videos to express their opinions, report on issues that matter to them and highlight unfair practices toward adolescent girls. The content created will be published/broadcasted through Charkha’s trilingual feature service in Hindi, English and Urdu to create spaces for discussion on these issues and demand both immediate and long-term IMPACT. Charkha, following a rights-based approach, will work with 100 AGs from strategically selected villages and transform them into leaders who, during and after the completion of the project, will take forward the initiative on their own with no direct involvement of Charkha. Although, we will continue to guide them as and when they will require our support. We will visit 10-15 villages for pre-assessment & shortlist 8 villages for intervention. This will be followed by organizing orientation sessions in educational institutes to create awareness about Project Abhivyanjana and identification of Cohort 1 of AGs for the workshops. In the first year, Charkha will conduct these sessions while from second year onwards, AGs will take over. Post orientation sessions, we will conduct 1 Basic Gender and Media Workshop and 1 Advance Gender and Media Workshop with each Cohort. This way, over five years, we will conduct a minimum of 10 workshops. Along with these workshops, AGs, with support from Volunteer Field Trainers (VFTs) - identified & trained by Charkha, will organize weekly sessions in which they will discuss & debate different concepts with their peers. As part of Project Abhivyanjana, 100 AGs will become community leaders with a deep understanding of development challenges and capabilities to articulate themselves on different media platforms. A minimum of 500 well-researched articles, poems and videos created by these girls will be published on reputed mainstream and alternative media platforms advocating for change at national, state and local level. We will also run 10 targeted social media campaigns to ensure the project is brought to the notice of greater audience and policymakers. In addition to creating spaces for development challenges faced by adolescent girls in rural Rajasthan in national media, the project envisions contributing towards increasing the number of grassroots women journalists in India providing a career option to these young girls.