Our educational institutions impart the knowledge of calculating square roots and measuring the distance from the earth to the sun. We learn frivolous things which are often redundant in our everyday lives. We are not taught to question, ponder, rebel, and innovate. In a world, where ideologies have played a role in peace and war, we are not taught about the same. Our understanding of the world, our zeal to change the status quo, our desire to learn, our ambition to impact the world are curbed by an education system which teaches us in order to mold, not make us grow.

The Feminist Project, based on UN SDG 5: GenderGender Equality, is an attempt to shine some light on one of the many things which we miss out on learning in school, and which might greatly affect how we perceive the world and act. It is a capacity building initiative to educate school-going children about Feminism and equip them with the skills of critical thinking, empathy, problem identification, integrity, and conflict resolution. Through this project, I intend to build a 2-3 months long programme, where I engage with school-going children and educate them about feminism, its history, its objectives, its branches etc. I intend to use the method of convenience sampling and connect to private as well as public schools in Delhi-NCR regions. I will approach schools through previously established networks and social media. The idea behind targetting schools based in Delhi-NCR is that I wish to implement my idea in a metropolitan region before developing it to suit the needs of non-metropolitan towns and cities. The students approached for the programme will be from the classes 6-10, they will be divided into two groups; classes 6-8 would be Group 1 and classes 8-10 would be Group 2. The knowledge will be imparted on the basis of an exclusively designed curriculum, planned considering the cognitive level of the children, based on their age and background. The classes will be held in hybrid mode — bi-weekly online classes and monthly meet-ups with the students offline.

The curriculum module will be developed in a way to make it interactive and activity based, so as to provide an understanding of the practical implications of feminism and how it can be applied in the simplest of activities to ensure that we are more inclusive and aware in our everyday life. The students will be provided with a resource list, specific to every session, in order to widen their knowledge base.

Alongside, I also wish to open an Instagram Page for the Project and update it weekly with snippets from the session as well as quizzes, memes, and other entertaining content which could be utilised to spread awareness and knowledge.

I wish to conduct the Project in collaboration with other fellows, who might also be inclining towards promoting gender equality through capacity building, if I am granted the opportunity to pursue this fellowship. I also wish to collaborate with a few organisations like Femme First Foundation, Women’s India Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Pink Legal India to develop my curriculum as well as host aguest speaker for at least one session.