We at Breakthrough have embarked on a project for incorporating Gender Equity Programme in schools and have tied up with J-PAL and the Punjab government to scale it up to 4500 schools across the state. Through this tri party partnership, the project aims to embed a gender sensitization curriculum in the school syllabus in Punjab to promote awareness of gender-based discrimination; change gender-biased perceptions and attitudes; raise aspirations of girls; and provide tools to enact behavioural change among adolescents.
Breakthrough is supporting the department in curriculum contextualisation and with necessary training tools for master trainers. J-PAL will be conducting the pre-post surveys and process evaluation and documentation.
The curriculum created by Breakthrough and approved by an expert committee will be taught by government teachers during regular school hours and is being integrated into the school curriculum for standards VI – VIII into three subjects i) Welcome Life (Moral Science) ii) Social Studies and iii) English.
A cascade training model is being followed wherein Breakthrough has trained over 200 master trainers in the month of April 2021. These master trainers are government officials and a cadre of District Mentor Trainers (DMT) and Block Mentor Trainers (BMT). As per the initial plan it was a residential training and 2 parallel batches were planned for 2 days’ gender 0rientation. Due to surging COVID cases just a week before the actual training Department of School Education Punjab agreed for online training.
As the way forward, these DMTs and BMTs will now further train other block mentors, who then train concerned teachers across the state. Breakthrough and J-PAL team will be closely monitoring the quality of the cascade training to ensure larger and greater impact of the program. Breakthrough is also contributing to develop a mobile app to assess and support the master trainers and teachers across the state.
The second phase of training of master trainers will be held in the month of July 2021.
