For petals on dust-free roads of achievement

[Robin Beecroft]

As many of you will know, Nyna Pais Caputi is an Indian filmmaker who has just completed a documentary called Petals in the Dust: The Endangered Indian Girls

It will address the discrimination, violence, and murder (gendercide and infanticide) of millions of Indian girls and women. The official goal is “to create awareness and initiate dialogue around violence against women, not just in India but globally, and spur people into getting involved and taking action.” She sees awareness and action are the keys to ending the violence, oppression, and child marriages. The research she draws on shows that this is not a problem that can be blamed on economic status or education, at least in India as a study published in the journal Lancet found that Indian women from wealthier households and better educated families were far more likely than poorer women to abort a girl.

Here is a recent blog on the film from Suzanne York:

From Suzanne's insight, we can see that the Director is taking her project to the world right now, so maybe this increasing awareness of the issue can create the potential for additional research and evaluation of that research with behavioural change at its core. Clearly it is not just about the elimination of poverty, but that does not mean that it is about social development. Of course, it is about girls' education and ensuring it happens all the way through to the end of secondary school. But that is not the end as the infrastructure must be there to ensure that young women have pathways that are open and are encouraged to take them to participate in decision-making and so apply that education.

How do we set about evaluating those pathways? How do set up M&E to examine the extent to which the pathways exist, how they are maintained, the absense of road-blocks, the flexibility for the traffic to flow at a steady sustainable rate, and the investment in new pathways for additional capacity when necessary.