In a candid discussion with Ritu Jain, the Secretary at All India Welfare Society (AIWS) and consultant with Go Nisha Go from Jaipur, Sachin Shekhawat, Youth Leader with Go Nisha Go, delved further into AIWS’ interest to collaborate with Go Nisha Go, and the organization’s vision to create a better tomorrow for the youth of the nation.
AIWS is a youth-led organization based in Jaipur, Rajasthan. The organization has experience in implementing projects with a focus on gender-sensitisation and development of youth in Rajasthan, specifically in Jaipur and other districts of the state. AIWS’ work has impacted over 12,000 lives, including 8,000 women in Rajasthan.
Talking to Sachin, Ritu explained that her lived experiences of having faced sexual and reproductive health (SRH) related problems during school and college is what led her to working on SRH rights of young people and adolescents. Ritu understands that SRH-based education and comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) is still not prevalent or taught in many schools and colleges. “Almost always, the awareness work towards CSE stops at providing free sanitary napkins. There are no active conversations to spread awareness happening. I want to change that,” Ritu tells Sachin.
“And Go Nisha Go is an excellent tool to disseminate information among adolescents in a way that appeals to them as well - through a technology-enabled, role-play game that facilitates decision making among the youth,” she says. This fundamental feature of the game attracted Ritu and AIWS toward collaborating with Go Nisha Go.
To realise the vision of Go Nisha Go, it was important that Ritu and AIWS help Youth Leaders find changemakers on ground. Ritu said mobilising young people to join the cohort was not as difficult as it might seem. “When young people are being taught through virtual platforms, and especially if games are used as the medium for learning, anyone would be glad to become a part of it,” she explains. “The idea is to create a chain led by changemakers who motivate their peers to join the program, instead of reaching out to people randomly,” Ritu adds. “This is also known as transformational leadership.”
While bringing together changemakers on the ground is one important aspect of the programme implementation. It is also important to understand that the aim was to build conversations in a region where menstrual health, sexual and gender rights, etc., are hardly discussed openly. When Sachin asked Ritu how she managed to get permissions for conducting events, stakeholder meetings, etc., for the game, she started by acknowledging that everyone wants to talk about it. “People have several questions and doubts when it comes to this, unlike what the popular idea is. But no one has dared to initiate this subject because of societal shame and stigma. Many educational institutions and faculty want to talk to young people about body anatomy and hormonal changes, but feel reluctant. They feel their respect in the eyes of the students will diminish if they were to speak about sex openly,” she explains.
This is again why the game interface of the Go Nisha Go programme is vital in building a connection with the youth. The game encourages young people to take decisions regarding education, career, sexual and reproductive health into their own hands, and aids in the improvement of self esteem as well, since the game also connects the youth with real life resources.
Lastly, Ritu says that, “It is the need of the hour to further scale the Go Nisha Go implementation programme to more regions and reach a wider audience for the game’s impact.”
Interviewer's bio: Sachin Sekhawat is a 20-year-old Youth Leader with the Go Nisha Go project from Jaipur. Pursuing Journalism and Mass Communication, this young leader aspires to build his career as a soft skills trainer. As part of working on the ground for generating meaningful youth engagement with Go Nisha Go, Sachin has conducted several Youth Adda workshops with changemakers.