Caritas India creating “Girl Champions”

“Emotional resilience is the ability to work efficiently under stress, to overcome shock, failure, and adversity, choosing positive alternatives that strengthen future decision, making capabilities and increase our adaption in stressful situations”.  Building emotional resilience in adolescent girls plays a vital role; it helps the girls living in rural poverty to come out from stress, family problems, society problems thus, turning them into a “champion”.

The “Saphara” program works to foster development ‘from the inside out,’ providing an evidence-based approach to impact the health, education, positive life trajectory of India’s adolescent youth. The programme provides an integrated school-based, resilience and adolescent health training program to improve mental and physical health, school performance, self-advocacy, social skills and relationships among youth.

“Youth First” provides a holistic empowerment program, combining personal resilience training with curriculum in adolescent health. It provides in depth understanding of following aspects (Character strength development, Social-emotional and Communication skills, Problem-solving and Conflict resolution, Nutrition, Reproductive and Sexual health, Safe water etc.)

Focus of both programmes being on adolescent girls; they learn to advocate for their rights, set goals, and make positive decisions that can help them to improve their circumstances and realize their dreams. Youth attend facilitated peer support groups led by trained schoolteachers during the school day for one hour each week.

Caritas India focus being on the most marginalized and excluded; the objective is to build Dalit adolescent girls resilience, so that they can stand up for their rights. Munger and Rohtas district being the geographical location, 88 adolescent children are currently engaged. The “Girls Champion Training” significantly improved their coping skills, self-confidence, courage, persistence, and ability to handle negative emotions relative to the control group. Girls receiving a traditional adolescent health program increased their resilience.

It improved their awareness of HIV/AIDS, pregnancy, menstruation, anemia, malaria, clean water, substance use, and health consequences of early marriage, relative to controls. It has significantly improved their attitude about gender equality, including their beliefs that it is equally important for boys and girls to attend school, and that there are never times when a woman deserves to be beaten. It promoted the use of clean water, including filtering, boiling, or chlorinating.

The “Girl Champion” empowers marginalized adolescent girls with knowledge, skills and support to improve their personal resilience and physical health, and to self-advocate for their right to stay in school and delay marriage. Most of the girls participating are first generation of their family to attend school; they are at a high risk of being trafficked. Most of them are prone to marry at 14-16 years of age. Caritas India through the “Girl Champion” programme provides a holistic empowerment, combining personal resilience training with curriculum in adolescent health. It provides in depth training of character strength development, social-emotional and communication skills, problem-solving and conflict resolution, nutrition, reproductive and sexual health, safe water, HIV/AIDS, malaria prevention.