Breakthrough India: Gang of Stars
Shifting norms in order to seed gender equality
“Why am I not allowed to play and am forced to do all household chores, while my brother gets to play whenever he wants to?” asks 11-year-old Seema from Rohtak, Haryana, India.
Objectives
Seema’s question reflects deep-rooted gender norms, a reality for adolescents in India. Gender-related challenges such as restrictions on mobility, lack of schooling or dropping out of school, early marriage and violence, persist in creating unfair disadvantages for girls. At the same time, rigid gender norms, and harmful perceptions of what it means to be a man, encourage adolescent boys to engage in high-risk behaviours and condone violence against women.
Gangs of stars (Taaron Ki Toli) is a gender equity programme launched in 2014 by the global human rights organisation, Breakthrough. The programme has a network of youth clubs initiated by Breakthrough India across 152 government schools, working with adolescent girls and boys in 4 districts of Haryana.
It imparts a gender-sensitive curriculum which serves as a safe platform and facilitative environment to enable students to express and discuss gender-based discriminations practiced in their family, school and the community. This initiative hopes to achieve gender equality in schools in Haryana. By building their knowledge, adolescents can adopt positive practices, access preventive, curative, protective services and enhance their skills and participation within their school, family, and community.
Programme overview
The programme started with a tri-party agreement between implementation partner Breakthrough, J-PAL South Asia who are the research partner, and the Government of Haryana’s Department of Education. The pilot programme, accompanied by a rigorous evaluation, was designed to help scale up the programme across the state.
Gang of Stars is spread across four districts in the state of Haryana, India, engaging with around 18000 adolescent girls and boys. To undertake this task, Breakthrough gathered inputs from various education officials and school principals and conducted multiple district-wide training of school teachers to build their involvement and engagement. Each school was guided by a teacher coordinator (“Druv Tara” — guiding star). The Druv Taras organised the programme in schools, observed the sessions, and maintained reports on the programme within the school. The Druv Taras supported the students by addressing their concerns, organising events and building an enabling environment at the school. Through consistent effort and intervention, the Druv Taras and Breakthrough facilitators have helped halt child marriage, ensure continued education for girls, prevent sexual harassment and create spaces for adolescents to assert themselves within their schools and communities.
Along with this, Breakthrough worked with local facilitators to help build their capacity within communities looking at gender, sexuality, rights, adolescent empowerment, facilitation skills, and community mobilisation. Trained Breakthrough facilitators visited the schools every 2–3 weeks and conducted 45-minute-long sessions based on a gender and rights workbook and other applied tools and exercises as part of TKT club intervention during school hours.
In each school, the programme also created a Gang of Stars adolescent club where all participating students were invited to enrol and sign pledges to declare their commitment to participate in the club activities. In turn, students received a workbook and branded materials such as caps and badges with the club’s logo. Breakthrough considers each adolescent to be a ‘star’, and together they have the potential to make a difference in their lives, homes, schools, and communities.
Breakthrough’s specially-designed curriculum for Gang of Stars clubs with 32 45-minute classroom sessions and 12 assembly-based sessions focusing on:
Psychosocial skills: getting to know oneself, one’s values, gender identity, aspirations, goals, and strengths in life, to create new identities and aspirations for a better tomorrow.
Interpersonal skills: communications, assertiveness and trust building, leadership skills, presentation skills, organising short campaigns for creating common strengths, and modelling new behaviours drawn out of secure relationships and friends in the club.
Community action: within Gang of Stars clubs the students led school assembly activities and a media and communications campaign through intergenerational dialogue, petitions, Facebook live, poetry, street theatre, puppet shows, and songs on creating safe school environment. The sessions created awareness of gender discrimination, changed dominant gendered perceptions and promoted gender-equitable attitudes among adolescents and their school and community environment. The programme aimed to influence a wide range of behaviours related to their health, safety, mobility, education, careers, leisure and age of marriage.
Impact
After an in-depth evaluation study conducted through a Randomized Control Trials (RCT), undertaken by J-PAL, the program saw significant improvement in the outcomes, measuring three impact indicators
- Gender Attitude Index
- Gender Behaviour Index
- Gender Aspiration Index
The evaluation findings revealed that:
- GoS has a significant positive effect on participants’ attitudes towards employment. Results suggest that it led to a seven percentage point increase in positive attitudes towards women’s paid employment outside the home. Changes were similar for boys and girls.
- GoS led to an increase of four percentage points in positive attitudes towards girls’ education.
- Programme participants also reported more gender-equitable behaviour such as increased interaction with the opposite sex. TKT led to a three percentage point increase in the gender behaviour index, indicating a more progressive behaviour. The increase was larger amongst boys, pointing to the significance of barriers for girls to act in accordance with their own altered attitudes.
- GoS increased the aspirations index by 0.8 percentage points. (The index covered aspirations for education, expected grades, discussion of aspirations with elders and what young people expected to be doing at age 25). Differences between boys and girls were not significant.
These findings all indicate the beginnings of a shift in gender norms among participating adolescents.
It is also important to highlight that through the Gang of Stars clubs, adolescents also interacted with various stakeholders, such as members of local self-government, frontline health workers, child protection officials, police, lawyers, journalists and celebrities to discuss and gain information regarding issues such as health, education, careers, and legal services.
Key Learnings
- Its successes reflect a well-developed model, taking a social-ecological approach of working at all levels. These included using media arts and culture to question gender norms at a mass level, creating spaces for public debate through community mobilisation programmes; sensitising families through meetings and Interactive Voice Response Systems, and building agency of adolescent boys and girls in schools.
- In addition, since adolescents are legally children, the programme built a strong child safeguarding policy and practice to ensure that when they raised questions or challenged gender norms they had a good system of support from their peers, at the school and the community.
- Breakthrough developed strong partnerships with service providers, opinion leaders and other stakeholders for adolescents to have access to quality services.
- Partnership with the Government Education Department enabled consistency of program implementation. The investment in evaluation by J-PAL enabled the collection of evidence about the effectiveness of this approach, which enabled further scale-up
The Gender Equity School Programme success has enabled Breakthrough to scale-up the programme across four Indian states of Jharkhand, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh as well as Haryana, reaching over 600,000 adolescent girls and boys
Learn more about Gang of Stars
Watch a short film about the programme
Read about the J-Pal study of Gang of Stars and access the report in full
For more information, contact: Urvashi Gandhi, Director — Advocacy, Breakthrough (urvashi@breakthrough.tv)
