Reframing Success: Systems Change and Gender-Transformative Education for Youth Thriving in India

• In Event: Systems Change for Gender-Transformative Education and Youth Thriving: Local to Global Perspectives

Proposal

The global discourse on gender and education has often centered on access, parity, and retention. While these remain necessary, they are insufficient to dismantle the deeply rooted inequities that fragment societies and constrain young people’s opportunities. Gender-Transformative Education (GTE) requires moving beyond access to critically address and transform the social norms, institutional practices, and systemic structures that reproduce inequality. Within a systems change framework, GTE illuminates how interconnected levers—policy, pedagogy, mindsets, and resources—can be aligned to enable sustainable transformation.
Dream a Dream’s experience across six Indian states demonstrates how education can be reimagined as a foundation for an undivided world. Drawing on large-scale Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) initiatives, our work reveals how gender intersects with caste, class, and geography to shape young people’s trajectories. Girls in marginalized rural contexts often report lower agency and self-efficacy, while boys frequently demonstrate higher confidence but weaker collaborative capacities, reflecting the socialization of gender roles. At the same time, girls’ heightened empathy and relational strengths highlight capacities that are undervalued yet essential for inclusive and peace-building systems.
Three insights emerge. First, systems change requires reframing educational success from narrow academic achievement toward youth thriving, defined by equity, dignity, and opportunity. Second, gender must be understood intersectionally, with caste, poverty, and geography as mutually reinforcing dimensions of inequity. Third, facilitative approaches that invite reflection on bias, power, and positionality create the conditions for educators, policymakers, and communities to disrupt entrenched inequities and engage in systemic reform.
Education, in this framing, becomes a pathway toward an undivided world—not only by expanding access, but by cultivating justice, inclusion, and the conditions for all young people to flourish. By centering gender-transformative systems change and youth thriving, Dream a Dream’s work demonstrates how local practice and reflective facilitation can contribute to building education systems that are equitable, inclusive, and peace-building.

Authors

• Apoorva Bhatnagar, Dream a Dream

• Sreehari Ravindranath, Dream a Dream

• Amit Kumar Vishwanath, Dream a Dream

• Joseph Thomas Rijo, DREAM A DREAM