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In India, although women today participate actively in education, sports, politics etc. but they lag way far behind against their counterparts globally. Reasons vary from poverty, stereotypical and patriarchal mind-sets to low education levels leading to lack of opportunities, skills, gender discrimination and early dropouts from schools. 39.4% girls aged 15-18 years drop out1 from schools. There’s no technology that can reduce dropouts but it can be prevented using technology. The paper discusses development & utilization of low cost technology benefitting 150,000 adolescents in rural areas of eastern Uttar Pradesh, India. Method and Approach Breakthrough implements an interactive school-based sensitization program (TKT -Taaron Ki Toli) to develop unbiased gender attitude amongst adolescents (11-18 year) challenging dominant gender perceptions and behaviours with sessions targeted at reducing school dropouts leading to improved aspirations and higher educational outcomes. Digital Attendance System (DAS - android application) is the method used for marking adolescent’s enrolment and attendance using thumb pattern, the former providing relevant socio-economic personal identifiers and latter ensuring their physical presence. It is enabled with an Early Warning System raising alert on finding any adolescent absent in 4 or more consecutive sessions, triggering an escalation request and considering them as vulnerable. Results and Discussion Pilot project, 134000 adolescents have been enrolled in 7 Districts of Uttar Pradesh. Manual attendance process was time consuming and needed full time personnel for monitoring whereas DAS reduced time taken for enrolment process by 50%, error free attendance with no duplication of data and reduced cost of human resources with 80% reduction in turnaround time to track adolescents’ absence. ConclusionTechnology has enhanced tracking mechanisms of vulnerable adolescents; we are aiming to reach 1 million adolescents by 2022 along with a reduction of dropouts from 12% to 3%.___________________________________1- National Commission for Protection of Child Rights report.
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