“The sessions we have received on gender equality and its importance really got me thinking. They made me realize that our society has got it all wrong. We do not give girls and women what they have a right to have – education, good health and opportunities to wear what they want, go where they want to and do what they want, without imposing restrictions on them based on the fact that they are girls or women.” 
-16 year old boy and ECF participant, Mehboob

In 2019, there were 230 million boys under the age of 18 in India. Research showed that 116 million of these boys would grow up to be physically violent and 56 million to be sexually violent. ECF was established in 2009 with a mission to address this national epidemic and raise every boy in India to be gender equitable. They believe that if boys and men are given the tools, knowledge and space to learn and practice respectful positive behaviors, they can become powerful allies in the fight for gender equality.

“These boys are not born violent or discriminatory. If they’re given the opportunity to do something different, they will,” explains ECF Co-Founder Rujuta Teredesai

WORKING IN PARTNERSHIP

ECF became a partner of GoPhil in March 2018 after being highly recommended by several other organizations. The GoPhil community has contributed to the ECF programs in several key ways by providing:

• Support for Project Raise, allowing ECF to scale their work and share their approach with more CSOs, mobilizing a strong national effort to raise gender equitable boys;
• Introductions to other GoPhil partners in India to help grow their Project Raise network and spread the word about their approach.

WHAT MAKES ECF UNIQUE?

ECF’s inclusion of boys and men as part of the solution is surprisingly uncommon. At the start of Project Raise, ECF found that fewer than 5% of organisations in India working on gender equity had strategy or programs focused specifically on educating or engaging boys.

“A lot of work is happening across India and the world that is based on supporting women and fighting discrimination against them. That work is absolutely important. But what is happening is that we are not investing in the root cause behind this discrimination. And one of the root causes is the attitude of many men and boys towards women. This is the gap that we are trying to fill,” explains ECF co-founder Rujuta Teredesai

ECF works to address this gap not only within their own communities, but across the entire country. Their collaborative programs and emphasis on sharing with other CSOs is a unique approach in the NGO-world, where too often scarce resources mean that organizations feel in competition with each other or territorial about their work. ECF wholeheartedly shares their findings, resources, trainings, and even funding sources, because they know that collaboration is the best way to scale up their work and to enact sustainable, widespread change.