Over the past four years, Horizons Program/Population Council, CORO for Literacy, MAMTA, Instituto Promundo, the Durex Network and International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW) have been engaged in a research program to examine the effectiveness and scaling up of the programme which had started as a pilot project in 2004.

The pilot programme was implemented in a low-income community of Mumbai and included group education and a community-based lifestyle campaign. Successful piloting
led to a large-scale evaluation study in urban slums in
Mumbai and in the rural villages in Gorakhpur.

 

 

More than 2,900 men aged 16
to 29 were directly reached for
the purpose of the evaluation study and a much wider population of over 100,000 was reached through campaigns supported by the Durex Network.

Interventions were able to produce positive changes in gender attitudes across all the study groups in both urban and rural areas.

Similarly, young men reported significant improvement in communication with their partners on key reproductive and sexual health issues such as condom use, sexual pleasure, STIs and HIV/AIDS.

 

Encouraged by the results of Yaari Dosti, ICRW's Asia Regional Office launched its Gender Equity Movement in Schools (GEMS) in early 2008. The initiative is currently being implemented in the three Indian states of Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Goa. This comprehensive program to educate young men and women on issues of gender equity is directly based on Yaari Dosti and Sakhi Saheli, its feminine counterpart.

 

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