Image for representational purpose.
Credit: X/@CRYINDIA
Mumbai: the Child Rights and You (CRY), one of the leading child rights organisations working with Indian children along with its many grassroots-level partner organisations spread across 20 intervention states, announced the launch of Poori Padhai Desh Ki Bhalai – a pan-India awareness campaign to raise public awareness and change societal attitudes towards girls education.
The seven-week-long campaign was launched on Monday (June 24) in five metro -- Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai and Kolkata -- and aims to engage all its stakeholders to address gender disparities in education.
The campaign will come to a close on August 15, India's Independence Day.
As part of the campaign, CRY and its partner organisations will aim to increase the number of enrolment and retention of girls in primary, upper-primary, secondary and higher secondary education in its operational areas; and will strive to create widespread awareness by engaging with all relevant stakeholders including children and their families, educators, community members, state administrative authorities, students at schools, colleges and universities, media houses, social media influencers, corporates, high net-worth individuals and the people at large.
Highlighting the importance of the campaign, CRY CEO Puja Marwah said, “Ensuring higher secondary education for girls is a non-negotiable for their empowerment and the nation’s development. Targeted interventions with specific goals and action points are needed to support girls beyond elementary education. This includes adequate public provisioning for girls’ education, financial incentives, improved infrastructure, community engagement, and robust enforcement of laws against child marriage. But none of these are possible without generating a mass awareness and a social resonance around girls’ education.”
Underscoring the positive impacts of girls’ secondary education on child marriage, she said, “Providing higher secondary education for girls has a strong correlation with delayed marriage for girls, improved health outcomes for the mother and the child, and offers high economic returns in the long term. Furthermore, each additional year of schooling leads to higher productivity and better job opportunities in the formal sector for girls, thus breaking the cycle of inter-generational poverty.”
Kreeanne Rabadi, Regional Director, CRY-West says that through this campaign CRY hopes to achieve its objective of further reducing the dropout rate specially in adolescent girls.
“CRY has a number of programmes across Maharashtra, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh actively working towards ensuring girls complete their education. We've seen that the longer the girls stay in school, the more empowered they become to participate in decisions that most affect them, and they can build better futures for themselves, their families and their communities. Through this campaign, we hope to prevent many more girls from dropping out of school."