Education> Prevent Child Marriage with Education and Leadership in West Bengal

Prevent Child Marriage with Education and Leadership in West Bengal
State: West Bengal
NGO: Mohammamed Bazaar Backward Class Development Society

Summary:
Due to migration by most of the men in these villages to larger cities, the women have limited livelihood like bidi making and the young girls also get involved in it for fighting poverty. A lot of the girls in these villages drop out of school which is in another village and they are married off at the age of 11 to 14 in the name of security. The project works on changing the community mindset on child marriage with resuming education of the girl children in Paniyara(620 households), Bahadurpur (810 households), Murarai (150 households), Gopalpur(352 households), Sujalpur (300 households) and Baliyari(1100 households) and making youth the change agents in their community.

Highlights:

• The project works with education of 500 girls and 200 boys in 6 villages. 4 additional villages are also looking for them to work together. 
• Gender sensitization workshops for both boys and girls on body image and developing a strong sense of self.
• Wall magazine in the villages by the young girls to give voice to issues that they care about and share their wishes and dreams with their community.
• Working with the community to bring awareness on child marriage being a crime and working with the police to ensure that the law is upheld.
• Leadership program  called "Shera Juktibadi" to have the girls be trained to argue with logic and reason and be able to express their mind in a public forum as part of public speech competitions
• Food Security with kitchen garden - as part of talking about gender disparity, getting access to nutritious food for the whole family is an important part of family life. 
• Discuss issues of child marriage, dowry, panchayat, lack of toilet in the village via street theater, fairs, song and dance performances as a way to move civil society and share opinions 
• Forming of self help groups as a way to handle finances and manage savings 
• Livelihood training by making seed jewelry and tailoring for young girls. Reproductive health and hygiene by training all 500 girls on how to make low cost sanitary napkins themselves.

Videos: (Note: This is an older video of the project.)