International Day Of The Girl Child, PPDN Continues Training Young Girls

People Powered Digital Narratives (PPDN) is working with young girls from marginalised backgrounds, training them on storytelling through mobile videos. Its aim is to train and encourage more young girls to tell their inspirational stories of beating the odds to access education, through short mobile videos. On the International Day of the Girl Child, these girls have created a video inspiring other girls to tell their stories through short videos.

In the video, Guddi Gupta, Aahana Patel, Nagma Salim Siddiqui, Shraddha Gadge, and Khushi Jaiswal – all aged between 13 and 18 years and all hailing from Navi Mumbai – talk about the challenges that they surmounted to access education during the Covid-induced restrictions, from erratic internet to living in small homes in cramped neighbourhoods and having to help out with increased household chores. The girls explain their effort to break the digital divide and embrace online learning.

"Over the past year and a half, we have faced great difficulty in accessing education. Everything moved to the online medium suddenly, which meant we had to rapidly embrace online learning, apart from fighting other challenges," said Guddi Gupta, a seventeen-year-old class 12 student.

Shraddha Gadge, a 13-year old class 9 student said, "We started #ConfessionBox videos treating the camera as our friend that we could talk to. This enables us to explain our challenges and how we beat them. The aim is to inspire and encourage more girls like us to come forward and start a conversation on the need to ease access to learning."

The girls then encourage others to share their stories through #ConfessionBox videos which will be featured on the #HerAkshar's Facebook page.