Creating Safe Environment
Based on the increasing number of cases of girls sexual and physical abuse in Nepal, and findings from the baseline and midline reports indicating some incidents of harassment from teachers, the STEM II project intensively focused on building awareness about sexual and physical abuse and establishing both a community support system for protecting girls and women in the project area and teaching them individual skills. With building awareness through campaign i.e. mass awareness activities, media and orientation at schools, community and local government project created positive attitude among parents, teachers and stakeholders. Whereas child safeguarding mechanism established and functionalized at all levels to prevent from abuse, mitigate immediate risk thorough complain handling mechanism and strengthening referral system.
Roll out
The project therefore decided to roll out Self Defence training to in-school girls, focusing on raising awareness, preventative measures, identifying and reporting child protection concerns, and learning about emergency support and referral mechanisms. This training has a unique, participant centric approach, for instance encouraging participants to self-assess their surrounding risks and capacities, engage in verbal and physical defence, interact with local stakeholders and parents and identify their support systems.
After the training of trainers workshop, the 88 trained young leaders mobilised to facilitate a 3-day training for 1,890 IS girls in grades 8, 9, and 10 and 650 OOS girls. The training was considered to be so effective that there were several requests from school teachers, local government officials and adolescents’ girls, which motivated the trained young leaders to expand their training knowledge and skills to different communities and school girls. Based on the FGDs and individual interviews conducted with training participants, they shared that they appreciated the innovativeness of the training methodology, the focus on building life skills and wider engagement of local stakeholders.
