Accelerating development and opportunity for all boys and girls in India

 

Accelerating development and opportunity for all boys and girls in India

Gender disparities in children's lives and the lives of adults who care for them prevent every child from realizing their full potential.

Girls and boys in India experience gender inequality every day in their families, communities, and in the media, as well as among the men and women who care for and support them. This is true regardless of where they live in the country.

In India, gender disparity leads to unequal chances, and while it affects both genders' lives, statistically speaking, females are more disadvantaged than boys.

In the world, females have greater survival rates at birth, are more likely to have a healthy development, and are just as likely to attend preschool as boys, yet India is the only developed nation where girls die at a higher rate than boys. Additionally, girls are more prone to leave school early. In India, adolescence is not the same for boys and girls. Girls typically confront significant restrictions on their freedom of movement and their capacity to make decisions that will affect their employment, education, marriage, and social ties, whereas boys typically have greater freedom. The gender gap widens as girls and boys get older and persists into adulthood when only 25% of women are employed in formal jobs.

Many women and girls in India may not fully enjoy many of their rights due to strongly ingrained patriarchal ideas, norms, traditions, and systems, yet other Indian women are worldwide leaders and influential voices in a variety of sectors.

India won't advance to its full potential until both boys and girls are given equal support to realize their potential.

Just by being female, females suffer risks, abuses, and vulnerabilities. Most of these dangers are directly related to the daily disadvantages girls experience in the economy, politics, society, and culture. During crises and natural disasters, this gets worse.

Due to social norms and practices that promote gender inequality, girls are more likely to experience child marriage, teenage pregnancies, child labor, inadequate education, poor health, sexual abuse, exploitation, and violence.

The answer

Investing in and empowering females through education, life skills, sport, and other opportunities to increase their value is crucial.

By elevating the value of girls, we can all work together to achieve several goals, some of which are short-term (improving access to school, lowering anemia), some of which are medium-term (putting an end to child marriage), and some of which are long-term (eliminating gender-biased sex selection).   

Changing how men, women, and boys view girls is necessary. It needs to mobilize various societal sectors. All of India's boys and girls will not have their rights fully realized until society's concept of gender changes.

Collaboration and targeted investment are needed to empower girls. The hazards girls encounter may be decreased, and by giving them the resources, safety, education, and life skills they need, they can fully develop and contribute to India's development.

Access to social networks, life-saving knowledge, and resources is particularly challenging for girls in daily life.  Millions of girls' resilience can be boosted by having access to programs designed specifically for their needs, with an emphasis on education and the development of life skills, ending violence, and taking into account the needs and contributions of girls from vulnerable groups, including those with disabilities. Long-term solutions created with and for girls can help to further bolster this resilience and provide girls with a route to change and a lifetime opportunity.

To create better futures for themselves and their communities, all girls, especially adolescent girls, need platforms where they can discuss the difficulties they confront daily and explore the solutions that work for them.

In response to the identification of the deprivations that Indian children experience, including gender-based deprivations, UNICEF India's 2018-2022 Country Programme was created. A gender priority that is openly stated in each programming outcome's program, budget, and results is one that it is dedicated to. These consist of:  

• Health: Lowering the excess mortality of young females and encouraging boys and girls to seek care equally. (For instance, front-line staff members urge parents to take sick baby girls right away to the hospital.) 

• Nutrition: Promoting more equitable eating habits to improve the nutrition of women and girls in particular (for instance, women cooperatives can create and carry out their own micro-plans for better nutrition in their villages). 

• Education: enabling more gender-responsive curricula and pedagogy (for instance, implementing new strategies for identifying vulnerable out-of-school girls and boys, and overhauling textbooks so that the language, images, and messages do not perpetuate gender stereotypes) as well as gender-responsive support to enable out-of-school girls and boys to learn.

• Ending child and early marriage is a key component of child protection (for instance, by helping panchayats become "child-marriage free" and supporting boy and girl clubs that educate girls in athletics, photography, journalism, and other non-traditional pursuits).

• WASH: Ensuring that females have better access to menstrual hygiene management, especially through the provision of well-equipped separate restrooms in schools (for example: creating gender guidelines from the Swacch Bharat Mission and assisting states to implement MHM policy).

• Supporting women's leadership in local governance and helping state governments create gender-responsive cash transfer schemes (for instance, a cash transfer project in West Bengal to help girls stay in school and a resource center for women panchayat leaders in Jharkhand).) 

• Increased female leadership and participation in village disaster management committees, for example, as well as increased gender disaggregation of information management for disaster risk reduction are all aspects of disaster risk reduction.