Plan India is back with the 2nd Edition of its flagship National Children Literary Festival (CLF) to be held at Hyderabad during 29-31 January. The Festival provides a platform for children to discover the joy of reading and reimagine gender in textbooks, stories, and images. It engages children to play a central role in ensuring that girls and boys are able to learn, lead, decide and thrive.
CLF’s goal is to promote child-led advocacy with educationists, policy-makers teachers associations, writers, story-tellers, and publishers thus promoting quality education, joyful classroom learning and gender equality in children’s literature, stories, and textbooks.
The 1st Edition of the National Children Literary Festival was organised in April 2018 in Lucknow which was participated by more than 300 school children, experts and development professionals from 10 states.
The 2nd Edition at Hyderabad would see the participation of 130 girls and boys aged 11 to 15 years from Plan India’s programmes in states like Bihar, Delhi, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Telangana.
Before the national event in Hyderabad, more than 100,000 girls and boys from schools in Plan India supported communities would participate in regional activities at the school, block and state levels. During the regional activities, children would engage in reading, understanding the concepts of gender equality and learning to communicate through creative writing and art workshops.
Objective of the National Children Literary Festival
Takeovers can help raise awareness, begin a meaningful process with stakeholders and create lasting change. In other words, we hope to:- Build the national collective of children, educationists, policy makers, teachers, writers, parents, and School Management Committees to promote reading habits in school children.
- Provide a platform for children to interact with policy makers, educationists, teachers, writers, story-tellers and publishers for influencing and advocacy to publish low-cost, gender-sensitive and inclusive children’s books and stories.
- Improve skills of children in using communications and media tools and enable them to use such tools for bringing social change at the local level.