What girls need to build brighter futures for themselves

This article is authored by Neha Parti, director - schools programme, Quest Alliance

What happens when you give girls the opportunity to think about the futures they want to shape? What happens when they are given the space to experiment and tools to solve problems from their lived experiences?

Adolescence

When these opportunities were created - a group of girls from Odisha imagined a future where their bodies are not used for childbirth, which could instead happen outside a human body through a technology called ‘Baby Box’. Girls from Andhra Pradesh created an app called ‘Cycle Sathi’ to help adolescent girls entering puberty clarify their doubts about irregular periods, pregnancy and so on without feeling any fear, guilt or shame of being labelled as ‘bad girls’. If we listen to these signals carefully, we will see what anxieties the girls are grappling with about their present and future. Cycle Sathi can be read as a story about girls acquiring technological skills. But the more unsettling question is: Why did they need an app to ask questions they should have been able to ask an adult?

Similarly, the “Baby Box” is not just evidence of imagination. It opens a conversation about which aspects of childbirth the girls wanted to change: Pain, expectations of motherhood, loss of mobility, coercion—or something else. When girls design a solution, they may also be revealing where families, schools and health systems have failed to be trustworthy. When girls are encouraged to imagine and create, they are also encouraged to take risks and experiment, they begin to challenge the social norms that are passed off to them as a given. They validate their own lived experiences and come to realise that their problems matter and deserve attention. They assert that their voice matters. A spark is ignited in them which empowers them to create better futures for themselves.

The theme for the International Day of the Girl Child 2026 celebrated on October 11 was "End child marriage and invest in girls' rights". How do we sustain this spark among girls to chart out a bright future for themselves? What skills and mindsets do they need, and what systemic shifts must surround them to make this a reality? If you have conversations with adolescent girls from across schools, many of them are very well aware of what is happening around them, how gender plays out in the everyday. They also have aspirations for themselves - ranging from becoming a teacher, to joining the army to some of them wanting to become a locomotive pilot as well. They see the contradictions around them - that their parents might want to be supportive of their aspirations but are also inhibited by what ‘the community’ will say if they agree to send their girl outside of the district to study. They see women being branded as ‘witches’ in their village still while understanding that it comes from a space of superstition.

So what would investing in girls’ rights look like? For a start, it could mean identity building which involves self and social awareness. Girls must be supported to reflect on how they have come to form beliefs about themselves, about right and wrong, and what is expected from them as ‘good girls’. They must be encouraged to engage with these beliefs and identities with a critical lens, a skill that will question the status quo, leading them to move ahead with the belief that they have the right to a better life. That they don’t have to shrink themselves, invisibilise themselves and go silent to avoid attention.

Data backs the need for this support. India recorded 4,41,534 crimes against women in 2024 according to the NCRB, which is roughly one every 71 seconds. The national rate dipped slightly, from 66.2 to 64.6 per lakh women, but that is a record of what reaches the police, not a measure of what girls and women experience in reality. Many never report because of stigma, fear of retaliation or pressure to protect family honour. Even when cases are registered, justice is slow and uncertain: Over 26 lakh cases of crimes against women were pending trial in 2024, and for every conviction that year, more than two cases ended in acquittal. Too often, the response to such risks is to restrict girls’ lives, with earlier curfews, fewer outings and less time outside the home. But safety that depends on girls shrinking their world shifts the burden of prevention onto the people who face the risk. If we want girls to imagine bright futures, we must also build safer homes, schools, workplaces, transport and public spaces, so that moving freely is an everyday right.

Empowering girls at an individual level also requires futures thinking, supporting them to envision their future which is rooted in agency rather than as a response to their current realities and experiences. This can lead to them imagining more hopeful futures, futures which uphold their right to safety, right to leisure, right to play, right to education, good health, work and so on, and instill the belief that it is possible to get there.

Enough and more has been said about the demographic dividend India is sitting on. As per Census 2011, India has 253 million adolescents, 47% of which are girls. There is also enough literature about how higher education levels contribute to better life and economic outcomes for girls and society at large. As per the NFHS 5 the mean age of marriage for girls (aged 20-24 at the time of the survey) who had completed 12+ years of schooling was 22.8 years compared to the national average of 18.8 years for girls. 48% of girls with no education were married below 18 years of age, 43% with primary education and 28% with secondary education were also married before they turned 18 as compared to only 4% among those who attained higher education.

But girls cannot do this alone. To demand better life conditions for themselves, girls need support and safety. Structurally, it means creating spaces for girls to collectivise. A collective gives them scaffolding, and enhances their negotiation and bargaining power to demand better for themselves - standing up against families to continue education, to go out and work and delaying marriage, questioning violence in their families and better remuneration and working conditions at their work place.

It also means creating more allies in the men and boys in their own communities who support them as they step out of the socio-cultural barriers. It means applying the lens of gender to all the policies and initiatives from budgeting to education to health to livelihoods.

Almost 80 years after independence, a world where a girl is able to complete college, step out of her house without the fear of ‘chhed chhad’ or harassment, she is not made to feel dirty or impure because of the bodily changes she is going through, should be an everyday reality and not an act of rebellion or an everyday battle for survival.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Neha Parti, director - schools programme, Quest Alliance