Google for Girls — Educating Underprivileged Girl Children in regards to International Women’s Day: An Initiative by WTM Chennai
Children are our country’s future decision-makers!
Hi, I’m Dhivya Krishna, a writer, digital marketer, educator on values & life skills and the founder of Nila Foundation.
Being the WTM Chennai chapter’s Ambassador, I kept pondering over hosting and organizing an offline event for a very long time. I realised that the COVID had made many of our lives miserable and boring. I told myself, “Definitely not another virtual event for sure!”
Fortunately, with the help of our WTM Lead, Ms.Shilpa, and my chapter organizers & volunteers, I was able to come up with an offline program.
Usually, we do online/offline events on any of the Tech-based topics in the form of webinars, seminars, talks or sessions. For a change, this time, we did not include audiences from college or professionals, instead, we travelled to the outskirts of Chennai city (rural areas) to educate the female kids.
Google for Girls:
I gathered a team of 17 volunteers (many new volunteers and a few existing ones) and planned to have the event on March 5 & 6, 2022 (Saturday & Sunday). The 2-day program was filled with learnings, experiences, wisdom and educating the girl students aged 11 to 17. To my surprise, half my volunteers were male, which truly defined equality.
I’ve already been educating young teens for quite a long time on values and life skills.
While being an ambassador for such a dynamic and well-doing community, I was so eager in piloting something useful for the welfare of the children around me utilising the community that I’m in today.
But WHY did I prefer doing this?
I discovered that the underprivileged children aren’t aware of the basic technologies and are found to be unnoticed in our educational ecosystem. They aren’t mindful and familiar with the advantages of being educated. A few girls are tired of getting permission from their parents to study after their 10th grade. And a few aren’t interested in studying as they think it’s a waste of time and that further won’t help them earn enough money.
Unfair thoughts, right?
To break off the chain of false beliefs, I arranged an educational camp, which is more or less like an awareness program for the deprived students (girls).
The Schedule:
It was a 2-day educational program that began at 7 AM and ended up at 7 PM. We covered 3 Government schools on March 5th and 6 Communities on March 6th.
Both the days were power-packed with learnings to the students & experience to the volunteers.
The volunteers were tired and exhausted in between the stretched sessions, but never did they lose the josh and presented the subject with the same enthusiasm and liveliness.
More importantly, the WTM community accepted to offer our requirements in regards to the swags and other necessities.
We received Notepads, Pens, Bottles, Tot Bags, WTM Stickers, Masks, Sanitizers, COVID-test kits and WTM Standees and more importantly, their SUPPORT.
Why under ‘IWD WTM’?
There wasn’t a better day for me to have accomplished this show. Contribution awareness is the essential element of the social communication required for healthy development. When the awareness is for our future pilots, future techies, future CEOs, future software developers, future marketers — I think International Women’s Day must have been the right day.
Women TechMakers community hasn’t mentioned ‘NO’ to any of my ideas so far. My suggestions and objectives are always welcomed with great back-up and sponsorship throughout. Be it a tech or a non-tech event, I’ve always been grateful for executing events on behalf of the community for society.
Google has always endorsed young minds personally and professionally.
Additionally, we were accompanied by a video team, which was sent by Google for shooting and capturing all the moments at the event and producing it as global awareness. We are more than thrilled to have been creating awareness & insights globally and we, as a team, will strive hard to make a difference in society under the right platform.
On the Day:
We could see many girl children getting inspired by noticing how our female volunteers represented themselves. The education was in the regional language (Tamil) but I must say that the creativity used by each volunteer in expressing how significant technology is in this digital world made me admire their works whole-heartedly.
We were prepared with many tech-based topics with presentations, pictures and videos on subjects such as cyber-security, how Google works, what is a search engine, what is the internet, how G-sheets and G-docs work, and lots more.
The volunteers had put in their heart and soul into creating presentations for the young girls.
We could see the girls taking pictures with our volunteers, shaking their hands, gazing at their speeches, asking questions and so on.
Overall, every session was very engaging and the purpose was fulfiled.
We hope to spread the awareness to many girl children out there to pursue their studies despite their personal problems.
Thanks to the communities for welcoming us avidly. Thank you to Harigaran Sir (Founder, School4Change), Raj Square Foundation, Arumugam Sir, School Principals & staff, Rafael & team, GDG Chennai, and the BEST Volunteers — Naveen, Aravind, Som, Abhishek, Shwetha, Trishi, Afra, Sadhana, Lakchudha, Hari, Thowbik, Prabu, Juhi, Malavika, Hema, Varsha, Subashini & Ratheesh.
Sooner, we will visit the communities and government schools again to understand how much they’ve comprehended the (tech) subjects that we have educated them.
