Voices of the community to inform Life Skills policy and practice

• In Event: The factors and community inputs that influence policy, practice, and measurement of life skills in East Africa and India

Proposal

The Life Skills Collaborative (LSC) emerged from the understanding that an education system focused on life skills can empower children to build resilience and overcome adversities. However, at the same time, it was realised that the policies and programs on life skills are top-down driven and there has been negligible representation of the community when it comes to understanding the need and requirement of life skills. Hence, one of the key focus areas of LSC’s efforts has been to create awareness about life skills by listening to voices of different stakeholders on their needs and understanding aspirations to ensure that the provisions match aspirations and provide inputs which can drive government engagement and action.

LSC - Voices is a nationwide engagement with young people, parents, and teachers to capture their inputs on life skills and translate them into insights. LSC plans to use these insights to inform policy and implementation of life skills within India’s public education system. The focus of the initiative is not just to raise awareness about life skills but to also engage with stakeholders on the ground to capture voices from the community, build a case for life skills and create contextually rich definitions of life skills.

Through the Voices exercise, LSC aims to collect 200,000 Voices from the stakeholders in 3 years, that closely represent the voice of the community i.e. young people (11-22 year old), parents, school teachers and ITI/VTI trainers. From young people, LSC focuses on their understanding of the life skills that are relevant and important for them to succeed in life. From parents, the inputs are taken on the challenges and opportunities for children and the support structure they envisage. The teachers offer their perceptions and understanding of life skills - whether they think that life skills are essential to building up the agency and aspiration of the children.

To capture these Voices, the LSC collaborators developed a robust tool for each set of stakeholders that underwent 4 rounds of pilot testing across 10 states in 7 languages in Y1. Covid-19 caused the data collection process to be planned as phone base surveys using KoBo as the technical tool to help in collecting and recording these voices. While in Year 1, LSC has already collected 30,000 Voices in Y1, it plans to collect 70,000 Voices in Y2 and another 100,000 Voices in Y3. The exercise will increase the scale of the initiative, year on year, to bring a nationwide perspective on how the community understands life skills and which skills are considered important to lead successful lives.

We will share the findings from Year 1 data collection as part of this report.

Author

• Arjun Bahadur, Sattva Consulting