Evescape

COVID-19 impact social life & learning of CHILDREN By Percy Cardozo The COVID-19 outbreak was like a bolt out of the blue, stopping the world in its tracks. Cutting across all boundaries - natural or man-made, it has struck us silently at lightning speeds, causing unusual disruption to our daily routines. Never in recorded history has the world experienced such a catastrophe simultaneously affecting almost all regions of the world. The pandemic is primarily a health crisis but is it also having shattering consequences on every aspect of our living. The insidious virus has forced countries across the world to use lockdown as a preventive measure for the safety of its citizens.   Countries have rightly resorted to lock down as a preventive measure, nevertheless, suddenly it has thrown children's social life and learning out of gear. According to UNESCO, as of April 2020, 1.5 billion young people worldwide are out of school because of the pandemic. In India, almost 1.4 millio...

Leading the Swedish way I met Annika Skogar, a young political science student from Lund, Sweden in the January of 2013. Lund, she informed me, is situated in the south of  Sweden, some 40 minutes away from Copenhagen, the capital city of Denmark. She worked for the student's magazine at Lund University and was also involved in Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She was in Goa on a scholarship from the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) and was researching on women issues, gender equality in politics and engaged in meeting politicians, activists, government officials and other stakeholders since the summer of 2012. This was when she came across Evescape (the women's magazine I had launched that year) and wanted to meet me. That was also the year when the BJP led Goa Government under chief minister Manohar Parrikar had launched the Laadli Laxmi scheme, as a response to the skewed male-female ratio. Evescape believed that a solution to the...