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Showing posts from 2019

Aspirations! Who wants it?

Visiting field areas for work is always an exhilarating experience as you get to learn much faster than you can learn from a report. As one keenly listens to people and their observations one tends make more connections in one's head. Many assumptions get challenged. Many new learnings emerge.  I recently visited areas around the Indo-Nepal border in Uttar Pradesh. One of the most interesting insight that I got during this travel is that there is active push-back to adolescents’ aspirations. The Community Developers or the field workers working in these areas found this active push-back as one of the greatest challenges in working with adolescents. I would have assumed it is around getting boys and girls to sit together for the sessions in the villages, which was surprisingly seen as a positive thing by the mothers with whom I talked to.  They felt it was important. However, I heard that the greatest challenge came from the village elders who think by engaging with the