Life Skills Training Through Creative Arts & Technology
Today more than 600 million girls across India seek skills that will make them employable. Yet gender-based discrimination and limiting stereotypes keep many girls from living their dreams. Particularly in skills development for successful transition to employability, adolescent girls are lagging far behind. This exclusion limits girls’ opportunities, threatens their successful transition to adulthood, adversely impacts their long-term health and well-being, and robs the world of their potential contributions. Investment in skills-building initiatives is one critical pathway to building girls’ and young women’s self-confidence and resilience, increasing their access to opportunities, ensuring their equal participation in the labor force, and promoting their empowerment.
#Skills4Girls
Protsahan provides technology and life skills training for girls in the slums and other marginalised clusters to help them get access to practical knowledge and information through employee volunteering programs, innovative technology programs supported by corporate CSRs and case based scholarships. The girls also critically learn four categories of skills necessary for their successful transition into adulthood that has agency. These include foundational skills, digital skills, transferable skills, and job-specific skills that help them with quality learning in tackling day to day problem-solving, negotiation, communication, financial literacy, digital literacy, internet safety and employability enhancement.
Fostering mentorship and entrepreneurship in girls
Protsahan encourages girls interested in STEAM to pursue activities and classes to ignite their enthusiasm in science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics by giving them an enabling and supportive safe learning environment that rewards exploration and provides hands-on experiences. Moreover, stereotyping girls and women as caregivers and homemakers has often restricted their fields of study to teaching, nursing, fine arts, home economics and the like. There are of course exceptions, but they are too few and far in between. It is worth questioning, as to why young girls are gifted ‘kitchen sets’ on their birthdays while young boys in the same family are given engineering sets? Protsahan is trying to balance this out by providing access to innovative STEM education for girls in the remotest slums of the country with access to games and project based learning through interactive expert sessions. The core idea behind this program by Protsahan is to foster job preparation through apprenticeship, mentorship and entrepreneurship, increase and improve the number of quality work opportunities available to girls post higher schools and to qualitatively engage young women and girls as problem-solvers and agents of social change.
Online Trainings on Gender Dynamics & Social Norms
Protsahan provides adolescent girls with support through intensive training on gender dynamics and social norms, combined with innovative programme design, to be able to enhance the social understanding of issues that directly impact them and their economic empowerment. A continuous programme for designing and testing new intervention approaches and gender dynamics curricula conducted in collaboration and partnership with experts further strengthens the knowledge and skills of the adolescent girls to accelerate social change in their communities and local settings.
