Life Skills Education for Adolescents

The low literacy status of women and the low participation of girls in school create a need for reinforcement of the strategies to promote girls' education. One of the problem areas identified is the education of girls in the age group of 11 upwards who have never enrolled in schools. Specially designed and planned education programme is needed for this age group to enable their enrollment and retention in schools. For this purpose, a multipronged approach is being used by Rajya Shiksha Kendra by starting Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidhyalay (KGBV), girls' hostels, residential bridge courses for out-of-school girls aged 9-18 and converting some of the existing schools into model clusterschools in selected blocks. To make the curriculum more relevant to the lives of the girls, Life Skills Education program was started in these institutions. The program is supported by Rajya ShikshaKendra, Bhopal, UNICEF, Bhopal. State Resource Centre, Indore is the nodal agency providing technical resource support to the program. The main emphasis of the project is to develop a model for promoting girls education and holistic development to lead towards healthy and empowered adolescents both in school and out-of-school. The implementation strategies include capacity building, development of need based training and IEC materials, networking, documentation, information sharing, advocacy.