Over 200 million children have been out of school in India for more than a year due to COVID-19 shutdowns. While all children suffered, girls were especially affected.  They had lower access to online learning, disproportionately shouldered household responsibilities like caring for siblings, and early marriage rates rose.  We are reaching out to seek your support for us to improve the education of 60,000 girl students.

 

At GSL, we recognized that school leaders had a critical role to play in activating their school communities to deal with ensuring that girls returned to school and thrived.  We launched Shakti, a program to train school leaders to run schools that are sensitive to the specific needs of girl children.  

 

In our pilot program, we trained 125 school leaders from Andhra Pradesh, who lead residential secondary schools for girls.  We found that school leaders had not received training focused on girls' education previously, and when provided with the training they were quick to shift practices.  For instance, the number of school leaders who reported holding discussions with teachers about understanding gender stereotypes rose from 51% to 92% and the number who shared resources on gender equity with their teachers rose from 70% to 92%.

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As we support the rebuilding of the lives of young learners in India, we hope that you will contribute to our efforts.