Changing course: implementation and evaluation of the Gender Equity Movement in Schools (GEMS) programme in specific sites, Vietnam, India and Bangladesh

Across Vietnam, India and Bangladesh, the Gender Equity Movement in Schools (GEMS) programme consistently shifted young adolescents' attitudes and got them talking more openly about violence, even where actual rates of violence proved harder to move.

GEMS works with adolescents aged 12 to 14 to challenge harmful gender norms, reduce acceptance of violence and build safer, more equal school environments. Teachers lead the programme through classroom sessions, school-wide campaigns, a student diary and outreach to parents, alongside training that helps teachers examine their own biases and those built into school systems.

This synthesis presents a regional evaluation of the GEMS programme, implemented in Da Nang (Vietnam), Jharkhand (India) and four districts of Bangladesh. 

Because GEMS was adapted and rolled out separately in each country, with different timings and evaluation designs, the report presents findings site by site rather than as one combined result. In Vietnam and Jharkhand, students showed a significant positive shift in attitudes towards gender and violence. In Bangladesh, where the programme had run for only a truncated year at evaluation time, this shift was not yet statistically significant.

Across sites, GEMS was linked to increased communication between students, and between students and teachers, about gender and violence. Students who attended more sessions generally held more equitable attitudes than those who attended fewer. Change in violence-related behaviour proved harder to shift, reflecting how normalised violence is in these settings and the limits of a two-year school programme. At the same time, greater recognition of violence and increased comfort in reporting it may have led more students to disclose experiences of violence, potentially offsetting any reduction in prevalence captured by the data.

The evaluation concludes that GEMS' core content works across different socio-cultural contexts, but how it is implemented, especially the depth of teacher training, strongly shapes the degree of change achieved.

This resource is from the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), an organisation working to generate evidence based, gender transformative solutions that advance the economic and social status of women and girls worldwide.

Key messages

• GEMS was piloted in Mumbai from 2008 to 2011 and subsequently adapted for Da Nang, Vietnam; Jharkhand, India; and Bangladesh, reaching very different school systems and cultural contexts.
  The programme rests on four pillars: starting young, engaging both girls and boys, using a gender transformative approach designed to create productive cognitive dissonance around existing beliefs, and working through school institutions.
• Across all three countries, evaluations found consistent improvements in gender attitudes, particularly regarding gender roles and personal attributes. Communication about gender and violence, with peers, parents and teachers, increased significantly in programme schools compared with comparison schools.
• Effects on the actual experience and perpetration of violence were smaller and less consistent than attitude change, and in some cases perpetration rose over time regardless of programme exposure.
• Bystander intervention held steady or improved in GEMS schools while declining in comparison schools over the same period, particularly in Jharkhand and Vietnam.