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Our Work

Building Gender Equitable Communities through a Rights-based and Sports for Development Approach

While seminal legislations like the PWDV Act 2005, highlighted the structural violence in the home and family, there was hardly any dialogue around the ‘gendered nature of public spaces’ and the structural violence within those spaces. It is in this context that CEQUIN began its work in 2009.

Our first on ground initiative started with the Gender Resource Centre (GRC) supported by Delhi Government in 2009 in Jamia Nagar. It focussed on building awareness on various welfare schemes, with a particular focus on empowering women and girls, and ran various paralegal training courses, vocational and livelihood training which facilitated home based workers and women to earn a dignified livelihood based on traditional skills and assets. This also developed into the Jamia Bazaar and Jamia Craft initiative which collectivised home based artisan workers and brought them to the marketplace.

With large scale public outreach campaigns on health and domestic violence like ‘Awaaz Uthao’ we were able to engage over a lakh people in the community. Recognising that women can play a multiplier role in redefining gender norms in their families and communities – we started the Mahila Panchayat programme, where women were trained and collectivised, to actively support their girls to have access to public parks, have a nutritional diet, stay in school, have the right to choose when they get married and conceive, moving towards dignified livelihoods.

These collectives play a critical role in advocating against gender based violence in the community and in supporting girls to overcome cultural and structural barriers to participate in sports and education. Many of our collectives have transformed into independent self-sustaining networks, who actively address cases of violence in their community everyday, through legal mechanisms, counseling and engaging with the local police. It was these women whose daughters formed the first few batches of CEQUIN’s Football programme in 2011.

While many Sports for Development programmes existed in 2010, none through a gendered lens, focussing on engendering public spaces. It was this deliberation to find an innovative design that led us to develop our model around football. We started the Kickstart Equality football programme with just 25 girls in Jamia Nagar in 2011, partnering with JMI University who provided their football ground for girls’ practice, especially at a time when the community had reservations to send their girls to public parks to play. From starting direct programmes, we also actively created advocacy platforms like the National Alliance for Women’s Football, to advocate for nurturing women’s talent for football in India. Today over 2.5 lakh girls have been a part of ‘Kickstart Equality’ in Delhi, Haryana & Rajasthan, with over 50 women coaches – alumni teaching as professional football coaches across the country. 

For CEQUIN, the dream of a gender equitable world has included men and boys, and our focus has been on building a new generation of feminist young men. Our campaign ‘Make Delhi Safe’ in 2010, with cricketer Virendar Sehwag, broke the mold of traditional gender programmes, because it centralised the need for men to dialogue with other men about masculinity and behavioural change, becoming role models. We designed many such media campaigns on ‘Mardon Wali Baat’ with cricketers Delhi Daredevils, led school campaigns, organized the WOWMen Awards in 2015 to acknowledge men who support and facilitate equal rights for their female counterparts. And by 2014, the Mardon Wali Baat programme grew into a fully running community based programme in Delhi, Haryana & Rajasthan focussing on challenging patriarchy and structural violence, redefining masculinity, and building leadership of boys as Agents of Change to lead impactful community campaigns, supporting women and girls in their community.

In 2020, we consolidated our work under various programmes, to execute and establish one holistic community programme, which engaged girls, women, boys and various stakeholders. We chose the project “Model City Delhi” in New Seemapuri, Delhi as the testing ground. We focused on the empowerment of adolescent girls, using football as an entry point for their holistic development in the community. For girls to truly thrive, we created an enabling environment for them which is owned and driven by the community themselves, particularly running parallel programmes with young boys and men, and women and mothers from the community. With all the engagements running parallely in the community, infused with high visibility community campaigns like football tournaments, road shows and rallies, women’s public events (chaupals), engagement with local police and community members and the adoption of a local park in the community – we were able to see visible change at the community level, at the family level as well in the individual lives of the girls, women and boys. In 2022, we unanimously coined this model ‘Kickstart Equality’, which had taken the last 10 years to develop, test, and finalise. 

Our Approach

1

Build capacities of Adolescents,
Youth, Women and vulnerable communities using an experiential methodology

2

Strengthen community development model of gender equity by partnering with diverse local stakeholders

3

Synergise civil society efforts with those of government for maximum impact

4

Create a feminist approach which seeks out active engagement of men and boys

5

Amplify voices of adolescents, youth and women through research, advocacy & policy interventions, engendering institutions and public spaces

6

Collaborate & cultivate networks with ecosystem stakeholders to innovate for scale

Our Thematics

Our Model :
Kickstart Equality

To achieve the vision of a gender equal world, our model focuses on the empowerment of adolescent girls, using football as an entry point for their holistic development. For girls to truly thrive, we must create an enabling environment for them which is owned and driven by the community themselves. Thus our holistic framework engages various stakeholders such as men and boys, local community members, institutions such as schools, colleges, civil society organisations, government representatives, funders, think tanks and the private sector, to create an enabling environment to empower girls and women, and create safe and gender equitable communities.

Flagship Programmes

Kickstart Equality

Nurturing girls’ talent for football through leadership development

Mardon Wali Baat

Forming women’s collectives for
gender-based advocacy and leadership

Mahila Panchayat

Engaging men and boys for
gender equity

Badhte Kadam

Building knowledge and skills for better careers

Health & Well being

Promoting health and safety for
sustainable outcomes

Engendering Communities & Institutions

Sensitising and advocating for an
enabling environment

Locations Where We Work

Our work prioritizes the most marginalized and under-resourced minority communities, and spans across the urban and rural clusters of Delhi-NCR, Nuh district in Haryana and the Alwar district in Rajasthan, implemented through schools and communities. This year we are scaling up our projects to take our model to newer geographies through strategic partnerships.


Delhi NCR – South,
South East and Central Districts

Jamia Nagar and clusters New Seemapuri, Shahdara Old Delhi


Haryana
Nuh/Mewat district

Villages Ghaseda, Rozka,
Tapkan, Kanwarsika


Rajasthan
Khairthal-Tijara District

Village Guwalda