From Silence to Agency: Empowering Adults to Act

Adolescents in rural India face entrenched barriers to health and well-being, including child marriage, school dropout, gender-based violence, and menstrual stigma. Conventional SBCC strategies-such as campaigns or street plays-raise awareness but rarely create safe spaces for dialogue or reflection. To address this gap, KHPT implemented Interactive Intimate Theatre (IIT) between 2022–2025 in northeast Karnataka as a participatory art form that transforms awareness into collective action.
IIT builds on traditions like Forum Theatre but innovates by emphasizing intimacy and iterative pauses. Performances stop at critical junctures, breaking the "fourth wall" and inviting spectators to become spect-actors-stepping into roles, voicing perspectives, and co-creating solutions.
KHPT trained 528 adolescent girls through intensive workshops blending acting, storytelling, puppetry, music, and facilitation with modules on gender and communication. Fifty theatre groups emerged, scripting plays rooted in lived realities-child marriage, teenage pregnancy, menstrual health, and alcoholism. Between 2022–2025, these groups staged over 2,000 performances, reaching more than 130,000 people across rural Karnataka.
The interactive format prompted parents to admit past mistakes, fathers to reconsider early marriages, and adolescents to voice aspirations publicly for the first time. As one villager reflected: "Earlier, these issues were whispered about. Through theatre, our children made us face them directly."
IIT demonstrates theatre's strength as an SBCC strategy-transforming silence into dialogue and taboo into conversation. By breaking the fourth wall, it enabled communities to discuss uncomfortable issues and co-create understanding-bridging the gap between awareness and social change.

SKY Girls Kenya is an adolescent empowerment and HIV prevention program that integrates mass media entertainment-education, digital engagement, and on-ground activations to challenge HIV stigma and promote healthy choices among girls aged 12-19. Formative research revealed misconceptions about HIV transmission, entrenched stigma, and limited opportunities for caregiver/adolescent dialogue. In response, the second season of PAA: Born to Fly was developed through an intensive participatory process with adolescent girls and HIV-positive communities to create storylines and characters that built solidarity with HIV-positive individuals and portrayed HIV authentically and accurately.


Aired nationally in 2023 on Citizen TV and online platforms, PAA reached an estimated 22 million viewers, with facilitated screenings and discussions in over 100 schools engaging more than 50,000 girls. Scenes depicted show Esther -  an HIV-positive woman - modelling solidarity and advising other characters on effective HIV prevention and treatment. A randomized controlled evaluation of the SKY program demonstrated significant shifts in knowledge and attitudes: a +18% increase in HIV/AIDS knowledge, a 13% reduction in stigma, and a 33% decline in perceptions of stigma as socially normative, with positive spillover effects among participants' siblings.


Findings underscore the potential of locally grounded, collaboratively produced storytelling to shift health attitudes and knowledge and promote solidarity with marginalized groups. Results show the importance of embedding co-creation at every stage of product development; the potential spillover effects of adolescent engagement on wider community attitudes and the value of young adult characters to navigate stakeholder concerns about sexual health storylines.

Adolescent girls in many rural contexts are already navigating complex emotions, self worth, esteem, relationships, attraction, digital interactions, yet lack trusted, non-judgmental spaces to discuss them. A deep dive study revealed that girls deeply desire to understand love, trust, boundaries, and bodily autonomy, but shut down when communication becomes moralistic or fear-based. 
Ab Banegi Baat – Aao Milo Seekho Jaano (Now we speak for ourselves, let's come, meet, play and learn) was developed in response: a multimedia, gamified, story-led SBCC tool designed to normalise conversations around emotional wellbeing,relationships, and consent. The product uses short relatable animated stories, scenario-based games and reflective exercises, in 3 modules highlighting stories of 3 young girls around self esteem, relationships and consent. The aim is to build trust, spark reflection, and strengthen girls' agency. The tone is warm, respectful, and conversational. It attempts not to say what is wrong or right but tries to enable reasoning behind each thought and decision so that the girls feel empowered to decide what is right for them.
The 7-minute multimedia compilation that will be presented in this session showcases the module's narrative arcs, character dilemmas, interactive decision-making pathways, and youth reflections. It demonstrates how grounding SBCC design in aspirational yet conflicted adolescent realities can shift communication from silence and shame to openness and understanding.
By centring agency rather than instruction, the product offers a replicable approach for practitioners seeking to address sensitive topics with adolescents in ways that are engaging, safe, and empowering.