Tracking the Journey of Adolescent Girls: Data Collection and Monitoring

The development of a reliable, comprehensive, and readily usable database is a crucial element in MVF’s norm change strategy. This database allows it to track each child in the 6-18 age group to more accurately identify the weak links in the educational chain on a continuous basis. MVF field staff gather information on every adolescent girl, those who are in schools and out of schools, with their names, the classes in which they are studying and if out of school, where they are and what they are doing. They make lists of girls enrolled in residential institutions, Model Schools, hostels, those planning to take the class 10 Board examinations and those attending higher secondary schools, diploma courses and undergraduate studies as well as a list of child marriages. Each girl is accounted for by the field staff who constantly get in touch with them either directly or through their networks. In this way, they enable girls to continue their secondary education, ensure that they attend school regularly, prevent early marriages from taking place and resolve any other issues that prevent a girl from pursuing her education as they arise. This process of information gathering brings the field mobilisers in contact with every household, allows them to have a conversation with family members and to identify potential allies in the community and those who see merit in the programme from among farmers, bus conductors, auto rickshaw drivers, shopkeepers, women’s groups and so on. It allows them to gauge the challenges in addressing the issue of gender equality and girls’ education, and they become aware of cases of violence, abuse, child labour and child marriage that require urgent action.

The household-level information from such village censuses is supplemented by comprehensive data collection at the school level. For each school, up-to-date statistics are gathered for each class covering children resident in the reference village as well as those coming from neighbouring villages. All cases of new enrolments, as well as individual-level information on all long absentees (defined as children not attending class for longer than 7-10 days) in each class, in each school are noted. These two databases allow MVF staff to focus on three key points of vulnerability. First, they can identify and follow up on each non-school going adolescent girl; second, they can identify children who are at risk of dropping out by quickly and accurately capturing episodes of long absenteeism (the first indication of eventually dropping out) and following up with the family of the child concerned; and third, focus on the outcome of annual exams, the crunch point in the transition of cohorts from one school year to the next, and from one schooling level to the next. Data are gathered for each annual exam of each class to track those that passed, those that failed but stayed enrolled, those that did not take the exam, and those that did not register in the next class. Again, individual-specific follow-ups take place for all children who do not remain registered.  It is through actions such as these that the rate of dropouts during the schooling process is minimized. Clearly there is many a slip between enrolment and completion; and this is where MVF’s interventions make a telling difference.

MVF mobilisers anticipate the multiple set of procedures that can deter a student from taking the examination and work hard to engage with the system to resolve critical bottlenecks, especially for girls who are first generation learners.  Based on their experiences in addressing individual children they also look for policy changes to make secondary school education free and at the least to have a waiver of examination fees and make the school responsible for processing the exam application forms. Also, when children do not pass in all subjects, they persuade the schools to allow them to re-enrol in class 10 to attend school rather than push them out and expect them to finish their Board exams without revision and remedial classes. In this way the schools are made partners in the process of changing social norms.

The information collected by MVF mobilisers is continuously updated and consolidated as numbers and statistics which show the progress of MVF’s interventions in quantitative terms. In addition, MVF has records of case studies, focus group discussions, interviews with teachers, parents and children, diaries of MVF mobilisers, lists of the meetings held by the MVF mobilisers with members of CRPFs, SMCs, and gram panchayats along with the numbers of child labour released and child marriages stopped. All this becomes useful for MVF to gauge the challenges faced by the mobilisers on the ground and in giving them support whenever needed. This information also assists in reporting to donors against the parameters agreed with them and for the purposes of accountability.