The children in villages face many challenges compared to their urban peers. Beyond an incomplete education, they lack essential life skills like self-esteem, communication, confidence, teaming, empathy, resilience and values.
As a result, they settle for low-paying jobs as adults. Initially it seems acceptable. But once they marry and have children, the low-income jobs become inadequate. With low self-esteem, resilience and confidence, they fall into a negative spiral — sometimes resorting to anti-social behaviour as the only means they see to address their problems.
For the girl child, the lack of life skills means succumbing to elders' suggestions to drop out of school or enter early childhood marriage. Unable to resist early pregnancies, they endanger their own health — and give birth to highly malnourished children.
From our interaction with the community, we observed this is the rule rather than the exception among most youth in the villages. While the Government and many social organisations already address the academic aspects, there is minimal focus on developing life skills in village children. We are striving to mitigate this by developing those skills at the most impressionable age.