e-Women & Empowerment, Winner 2013

English and ICT for Adolescent Girls (EITA) is creating community-based learning centres for girls in Bangladesh. It provides access to English and ICT for adolescent girls in order to create livelihood opportunities, promote empowerment and overcome the gender digital divide. The project has created non-formal English and ICT clubs for almost 1000 girls through 5 -months batches.

British Council has partnered with BRAC, a Bangladeshi NGO, to set up a network of commu-nity ICT clubs for adolescent girls, tapping into Adolescent Development Programme. These clubs provide an informal space, where participants can experience learning English through the British Council’s digital English resources, preloaded in an offline format onto small note-books. Guided by the peer leaders (who have been initially trained by BRAC and the British.

Council and have continual mentoring and support), the participants use the notebooks to nav-igate the resources, which use songs, games and interactive activites, mapped to the Bangla curriculum and supported with Bangla text. The community ICT centre for women provides un-restricted access to ICTs in a safe environment, and provides training and guidance for women. Rationale English is an international language, and in a low-income country like Bangladesh, having English skills can be a key to success. The project is reaching out to marginalised young girls and bringing them to the forefront of society. The English and ICT for Adolescent girls project is also working towards readdressing gender imbalance.