Shifting Gender Norms: Young Women’s Lives at Home, Work & Online

In northeast Karnataka, India, adolescent girls face intersecting vulnerabilities-child marriage (up to 39% in some districts), teenage pregnancy (12%), school dropout (13%), anaemia (65%), and gender-based violence (40%). Deeply entrenched gender norms worsen these risks. After menarche, girls' interactions with fathers diminish, excluding them from key decisions about education and marriage. Fathers-often the final decision-makers-prioritize sons' futures while remaining distant from daughters' aspirations. This silence sustains practices like Yadi-Mel-Shaadi (marrying daughters alongside sons to reduce costs), undermining efforts to end child marriage.
To bridge this communication gap, the Sphoorthi – Girl Leads Girl program (2015–2025) empowered girls while engaging fathers as allies. The intervention reached 103,000 adolescent girls across 8,110 groups and 200,000 parents in seven disadvantaged districts.
At its core was a Life Skills Education curriculum that enhanced girls' confidence, critical thinking, and agency. Complementing this, Samvada-structured dialogue sessions-created safe spaces where girls voiced their fears of early marriage and aspirations for education, while fathers, through exposure visits and interactions with women achievers, listened to their daughters-often for the first time.
These exchanges nurtured trust, reshaped family dynamics, and fostered mutual respect. Outcomes included strengthened father–daughter communication, doubled girl participation in household decision-making, and the prevention of 494 child marriages within two years. This experience affirms that SBCC strategies that rebuild trust within families can achieve what laws alone cannot-turning silence into dialogue and dependence into partnership.

The Community Service as Pathways to Work (CSPW) project was initiated to provide community service opportunities and job preparedness skills for 200,000 youth, 70% are women, transitioning to dignified and fulfilling work while significantly contributing to the overall health and well-being of communities. Multifaceted barriers are limiting young girls from benefiting from employment opportunities. These barriers include self-limiting mindsets, community perceptions/norms about young girls' ability, limited information access as many stay home supporting families, as well as existing biases towards young girl's rights. To address these barriers, a community service approach was co-designed to integrate SBC interventions that targeting shifting mindsets of young girls, addressing community perceptions and norms about young girls' participation, and addressing biases within the employment system to foster young female participation in community service platforms. Promoting the benefits of community service for young girls as dignified work, training to provide skills in leadership and self-efficacy, pause and reflect sessions for young girls to share experiences, organizing community dialogue and showcases, and advocacy and sensitization with providers were applied to address biases hindering young girls' participation. Reach and effectiveness assessments among participating youth confirmed that the program enabled them to acquire the needed skill and knowledge. This changed community perceptions related to girls' abilities and potential. Moreover, the system readiness within labor and skill and women affair offices to provide opportunities for young girls improved. SBC practitioners must systematically integrate gender-sensitive storytelling/dialogue approaches to dismantle bias and create equitable employment pathways.

In the Western Cape, South Africa, the clinics didn't close during COVID-19, but for many women, they became out of reach. Transport was limited, incomes dropped, movement was restricted, and discretion became harder to protect. And yet, many women continued to access contraception. How? That's the story this study set out to tell.
Through three rounds of qualitative data collection, focus group discussions with women of reproductive age, interviews with healthcare providers, and dialogues with Department of Health officials, this research traced how women adapted, and how the system did-or didn't, adapt with them. Women leaned on pharmacies, community health workers, informal delivery networks, and digital tools. Providers, too, stretched the rules, issuing longer refills, shifting to telehealth, and finding new ways to reach patients. Policymakers were often catching up.
What emerged was not just a coping mechanism, but a quiet redesign of contraceptive access, led from the ground up. The Levesque Framework helped map these journeys, but the deeper insight was about trust, autonomy, and the value of listening to those who live the policy gap daily.
This story asks: what if we built contraceptive delivery models around how women actually access care-not just how we imagine they should?

When Zikoko Life, an anthology series by Big Cabal Media launched, the goal was to tell real stories about female agency and reproductive health challenges against the backdrop of love, identity, and modern life in Nigeria. What we didn't anticipate was that the most powerful storytelling would happen after the credits rolled.
Across YouTube and Instagram, the comment sections under the short films began to transform into forums for raw, unfiltered dialogue about gender, relationships, and social norms. Viewers, often young Africans, were reacting and reframing the narratives, questioning biases, and validating one another's experiences.
This presentation explores the "Comment Section Revolution", a participatory model of storytelling that redefines communication as shared authorship. It argues that true inclusion lies not in producing messages for the public, but in creating digital spaces where the public can rewrite the message.
Through the lens of the films, this session demonstrates how youth-driven, dialogic storytelling can challenge stereotypes, humanize gender debates, and transform passive audiences into active co-creators of meaning.