WeUnlearn

• In India, problematic gender norms are imprinted in early childhood and manifest in adolescence. Mental health issues are also common in this age- 1 in 5 adolescent children in India suffer from mental morbidity. Research has shown a complex link between gender and mental health issues at this age. Current solutions in India deal with these two issues separately, are mostly isolated, in-person and difficult to scale.
• We have designed a chatbot - Wulu - that aims to empower adolescents from underserved communities, with knowledge, skills and resources to develop emotional resilience and lead gender equitable lives.
• The challenges we have highlighted are universal and prevalent across the world. Our solution can be scaled beyond India by customizing it by demographic. Our solution has the potential to positively impact the lives of millions of adolescent children to help them overcome gender and mental issues from an early age. 

India slipped 28 places to rank 140th among 156 countries in the WEF’s Global Gender Gap Report 2021. In India, gender discrimination starts at an early age and deprives adolescents of their life potential due to incomplete schooling, early marriage, intimate partner violence/sexual abuse, bullying and other issues more so in underserved communities. Our analysis of existing interventions highlighted three important factors that impeded long lasting impact – target beneficiary (mostly girls), nature of intervention (in-person) and focus of intervention (not including mental health). Interventions focusing only on girls inadvertently put the onus on girls to be agents of change. Boys too feel the effect of patriarchy, and it is imperative that we educate both groups so that they can empower each other. In-person interventions are difficult to scale, especially in a covid-ravaged world. Gender roles exert different kinds of pressures and boys and girls and other genders. Research on non-binary genders is limited, however the pressure to conform to either of the genders has led to severe mental health issues, especially during the pandemic. By focusing on both gender and mental health, there could high gain in efficiency of interventions. 

WeUnlearn has developed a new scalable technology solution – Wulu – to help underserved adolescents in India build their emotional resilience and lead gender-equitable lives. Wulu’s chatbot architecture is AI driven and uses data analytics to deliver content based on priority issues for the adolescent. The learning pathway starts at the adolescent’s current awareness and skill level and then takes them on a guided journey of building and strengthening the same. We have developed a three-pronged model for impact - Awareness, Skilling and Role Play. While awareness empowers the adolescent to label and unpack the gender-based discrimination they face, skills help them prepare to act and role play helps them practice before they deal with issues in the real world. We have developed a curriculum deeply rooted in developmental, cognitive and behavioral psychology to address the priority issues. We designed and tested multiple prototypes of Wulu last year and improved it based on learnings from previous pilots. In our recent pilot we decided to deliver content through automated messages via Whatsapp. The content consists of short videos everyday followed by few questions to gain understanding of the content. 

We are looking to serve adolescent children in India between the age group of 14-18 years belonging to households with average income less than INR 10 – 30 K per month ($140-400 per month). We conducted extensive field visits in 2019 to understand the priority issues faced by underserved adolescent children. We have conducted 3 pilots across 1500 children till now to build our solution prototype based on their feedback. In the coming months we plan to test multiple features of our latest prototype and getting real time feedback from children. We have already partnered with NGOs like Teach for India, Barefoot Edu, Freedom English Academy (FEA) to get access to children and plan to do the same in future. We plan to engage in the following ways in future-

• Integrate objective type questions with our intervention schedule for students to comment and share feedback. Simple questions to gauge whether the adolescents felt connected to the content and were able to absorb the intended learnings.
• After completing one intervention cycle, one on one interviews with selected participants chosen on the basis of their interaction with Wulu. Collecting data from participants that interacted daily to understand what encouraged their relationship with our solution and what is the value added. 
• Finally, to be able to continuously build on our content and ascertain that the problem areas we are touching upon and our approach towards the problem areas is relevant for our audience. Conducting regular field surveys (telephonic or face to face) using semi structured interviews will be an ongoing activity.

We are developing a technology solution for adolescents to have access to  quality, safe and equitable learning on gender and mental health issues. We are mostly focusing on underserved adolescents in low-connectivity settings and using innovative techniques like games, interactive play to enhance learning on complex issues. 

India is home to the largest number of adolescents in the world - more than 365 million - of which almost half are underserved. Our solution works for any child (14-18 years) who has access to a smartphone. Access to connected devices has been increasing significantly in India, especially in rural areas.

We have conducted 3 pilots so far to improve Wulu prototypes. In our recent pilot, we wanted to check the effectiveness of Wulu in changing gender attitudes. We deployed a 2-week intervention to test 2 modules of Wulu - gender stereotypes and bullying. We conducted a Randomized Control Trial with a total sample of ~1000 children between 14-18 years of age in urban poor areas of Delhi. We partnered with an NGO providing vocational education to these children across Delhi. The children were randomly selected and distributed in treatment and control groups. The children in the treatment group received the full 2-week intervention whereas the control group did not. 368 children from treatment and 284 from control completed the surveys. We also conducted focused group discussions with ~20 children to get their feedback. We observed a positive attitude change of 10-15 % points in just 2 weeks. 

We are the only organization working at the intersection gender and mental health issues and focusing on marginalized adolescents in India. Most organizations focus on either gender, or mental health and mostly on more profitable high income groups. We are technology based, scalable and context specific. Our curriculum is deeply rooted in science (behavioral and cognitive psychology), takes into account developmental needs of adolescents as well as the comprehension ability of our target audience. Our approach is not didactic, we have a fun, interactive way to teach children complex topics with application of learnings.

In our pilots we have learnt that adolescents were aware about their priority issues but they did not know how to label the issue. For example, we received great response on the topic bullying and many adolescents shared that they knew they were facing a problem but did not know it was bullying and did not know how to address the problem either.

We are seeing good traction on solutions concerning gender and sex education, social emotional learning of children and the pandemic has brought out mental health as a key issue to focus on. We saw EdTech startups receiving huge amount of funding during the pandemic. It is important that we try to address the root causes of issues and not just provide band-aid solutions. Understanding of child psychology, the trauma they may have witnessed specially during the pandemic is extremely important to design solutions concerning children. 

We are in the pilot stage of our solution and we have conducted 3 pilots so far covering around 1500 children across India. We plan to continue doing pilots for the next one year and focus on improving content, technology design and user interface. Depending on how users are responding to our solution, we will figure out how and when should we go to market and start scaling up. We understand the responsibility of dealing with children and mental health and we want to be absolutely sure that our solution does not harm in any way possible.

Our content currently is both in English and Hindi (prevalent language in India), however to reach the marginalized populations we will have to convert to the many vernacular languages spoken in India. We also need adequate strength within the technology team to be able to handle large numbers. Hence, putting a number to scale we can reach in 5 years is premature. We will have more clarity once our solution has reached the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) stage. 

We are building evaluation measures in the pilots we are conducting to better understand the effectiveness of our solution. We are first looking at attitude change that can lead to behavior change and eventually we will measure stickiness of our solution.

In our recent pilot, we conducted a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) with ~1000 underserved adolescent children in urban poor areas of Delhi. Within just 2 weeks, we saw a positive shift (10-15 percent point) in gender attitudes in the treatment group. Results show statistically significant changes in attitudes concerning gender stereotypes and bullying. Girls responded more to the content than boys. Children with mothers whose education was more than high school showed greater change than mothers with less than high school education. Attitudes regarding boys doing household chores or women moving beyond caregiving roles did not see much positive change.

Focused Group Discussions (FGDs) also reflected the effectiveness of content in changing attitudes towards priority issues. The research study helped our team understand the nuances of the priority issues better to improve future prototypes of Wulu. It highlighted the role of family ties, the importance of the identity of chatbot for interaction, and the need to create a safe space and solve for gender-determined mental health issues as well.

We have 4 full time members and 7 part-time members in our team.

We are a young, women-led, feminist organization fighting gender discrimination in India. Individuals in our team have suffered gender abuse and mental health issues, and are committed to empower India's youth with the tools and resources to overcome difficult situations. Our Co-Founders, Meghna and Pallavi, have been vocal about their struggles in dealing with gender abuse suffered at the age of adolescents and the same manifesting into mental health issues later in life (see their TEDx talk). 

Our team comprises members with expertise in technology solutions, psychology background, as well as a good mix of corporate and non-profit experiences. Our team has experience with organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bain & Company, Dost Education, Google, Microsoft and others. We understand the development sector landscape in India and have good network with donors as well as on ground organizations. We also have a strong background in research application and on ground experience of adolescents’ issues. Our content is always backed by scientific research and evidence. Our curriculum has been designed in consultation with faculty from Harvard University and is deeply rooted in cognitive and behavioral science. We understand the responsibility of dealing with critical issues and plan to scale up only after having strong evaluation data on the effectiveness of our solution.

We run our organization on feminist principles. Apart from Wulu, we also engage in social media advocacy. By using social science to explain social issues including gender inequity, we have already built a strong community of around 28,000 people through social media in a short time that has used our work to unlearn, start difficult conversations and inculcate healthier gender norms.   

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are part of our organizational principles. Our Co-Founder is Queer and actively engaged in Pride events in their home city. We understand intersectionality and the need to always focus on caste, class, religion, income and various other lenses while designing solutions. Our primary focus is on underserved adolescents across the gender spectrum as we want to focus on equity and correct the historical wrongs that have prevented such marginalized populations to be at par with privileged sections of society.

Our team understands that Wulu’s journey is a marathon, not a sprint. Changing behaviors of adolescent children and improving their lives for the better is a great responsibility and requires extensive research, both secondary and primary. We are not aiming to be a unicorn EdTech startup in a short time. We are rather taking time to develop our curriculum, conducting pilots, evaluating results till we are sure we can go to market. Wulu’s design started 2 years ago with our team spending months on ground trying to understand issues. In the past 1 year we conducted three pilots with support from universities like Harvard and Stanford. We are applying to Solve so that we can continue on our journey to learn what it takes to improve lives of underserved adolescent children in India. We require guidance from impact-minded leaders on how we should move ahead in our journey, across evaluation, monitoring and business model development.

Our team has been working on developing Wulu for the past 2 years. Due to lack of funds, our team is mostly volunteer driven. While are volunteers are extremely passionate about the solution, most of them are not able to dedicate full-time to the work. We need additional funding to be able to hire them and make them financially independent. 

Our focus is on underserved adolescent children in India. We plan to engage in B2B partnerships with organizations working with such children. Access to and collaboration with many organizations has been easy as we did not charge them any fee. We have not yet figured out any organization working in a field like ours that has been able to create a successful business model. We need guidance in the same. 

We are leaning towards becoming a hybrid organization to diversify our sources of funding. For that, we need adequate support, specifically in financial and legal regulations that we need to follow. 

We are keen to collaborate with the Women & Gender Studies Department at MIT, specially for our future pilot studies and research evaluations. We will be able to access the Solve community specially to learn from innovative solutions from around the world focusing on teaching life skills and building resilience in children. For example, we could learn from Ban Dek Foundation’s work on teaching children life skills, 40K Plus focusing on creating access to quality learning in rural areas, The Rumie Initiative’s work to scale learning for underserved communities and Open Learning Exchange focusing on Disadvantaged Youth to learn life skills amongst others.

We are a young, women-led, feminist organization fighting gender discrimination in India. Individuals in our team have suffered gender abuse and mental health issues, and are committed to empower India's youth with the tools and resources to overcome difficult situations. Our Co-Founders, Meghna and Pallavi, have been vocal about their struggles in dealing with gender abuse suffered at the age of adolescents and the same manifesting into mental health issues later in life (see their TEDx talk).

We run our organization on feminist principles. Apart from Wulu, we also engage in social media advocacy. By using social science to explain social issues including gender inequity, we have already built a strong community of around 28,000 people through social media in a short time that has used our work to unlearn, start difficult conversations and inculcate healthier gender norms.   

Our solution focuses on all genders. Interventions focusing only on girls inadvertently put the onus on girls to be agents of change. Boys too feel the effect of patriarchy, and it is imperative that we educate both groups so that they can empower each other. Our primary focus is on underserved adolescents across the gender spectrum as we want to focus on equity and correct the historical wrongs that have prevented such marginalized populations to be at par with privileged sections of society. 

We are building an AI based conversational chatbot to help underserved adolescents in India deal with gender and mental health issues. 

Through our field visits we understood that text based solutions are preferred by children as it maintains their privacy, specially in a small household during the pandemic. Chatbots provide privacy, anonymity, and ease of access on smartphones. They enable us to address delicate and/or uncomfortable issues. We are also witnessing multiple mental health AI based chatbots becoming trusted companions of people. 

Our chatbot’s content is tailored to suit the demographic. We understand the importance of cultural sensitivity and our content reflects that.

We are aiming to reach millions of adolescent children and help them overcome gender and mental health issues from an early age, specially for children belonging to low income families. 

We are building an AI based conversational chatbot to help underserved adolescents in India deal with gender and mental health issues. 

Through our field visits we understood that text based solutions are preferred by children as it maintains their privacy, specially in a small household during the pandemic. Chatbots provide privacy, anonymity, and ease of access on smartphones. They enable us to address delicate and/or uncomfortable issues. We are also witnessing multiple mental health AI based chatbots becoming trusted companions of people. 

Our chatbot’s content is tailored to suit the demographic. We understand the importance of cultural sensitivity and our content reflects that.

We are aiming to reach millions of adolescent children and help them overcome gender and mental health issues from an early age, specially for children belonging to low income families.