RFP-Understanding the Intersection of Culture

RFP-Understanding the Intersection of Culture, Gender and Education in Tribal Communities

Room to Read India

Apply by: 23 Aug 2026

Understanding the Intersection of Culture, Gender and Education in Tribal Communities:

Study of Chhattisgarh and Telangana

1. Organizational Overview

Room to Read is a global organization transforming the lives of millions of children in low-income communities by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education. Founded in 2000 on the belief that World Change Starts with Educated Children®, our model focuses on deep, systemic transformation within schools during the two periods that are most critical in a child's schooling: early primary school for literacy acquisition, and secondary school for girls' education. We work in collaboration with local communities, partner organizations, and governments to build a habit of reading among primary school children and to ensure girls can complete secondary school with the skills to negotiate key life decisions.

1.1 Study Overview:

Room to Read is strengthening its partnership with Tribal Affairs Departments to institutionalize necessary gender-transformative life skills education within tribal residential school systems. Recognizing that tribal adolescents—particularly girls—navigate unique social, cultural and gender-related challenges during adolescence, the program seeks to equip them with the knowledge, skills, confidence and agency required to make informed life decisions, exercise their rights and successfully transition into adulthood. Currently, Room to Read is implementing and supporting gender-transformative life skills programs in partnership with Tribal Departments in Chhattisgarh and Telangana. As these programs expand, there is a need to better understand the diverse socio-cultural, educational and institutional contexts that shape the lives and experiences of tribal adolescents, with gender serving as a cross-cutting lens. To address this need, Room to Read proposes to undertake a Tribal Landscape Study across the two states. The study will combine secondary research and primary field inquiry to generate evidence on tribal communities, gender norms, educational ecosystems and institutional structures. The findings will inform the contextualization of program design, life skills content, implementation approaches, capacity building and government partnerships, enabling more culturally responsive and gender-transformative programming for tribal adolescents.

2. Background of The Study

Room to Read has been engaged in sustained programmatic work across India to advance life skills education and gender-transformative practices, particularly among adolescent girls in government and tribal welfare residential institutions. In Chhattisgarh, Room to Read is implementing a Tribal Girls Life Skills Program in 141 residential hostels across six districts of the Surguja Division, in collaboration with the Department of Tribal & Scheduled Caste Welfare, reaching approximately 7601 girls in Grades 6–10. This work is grounded in the recognition that tribal adolescent girls face compounded vulnerabilities — shaped not only by socio-economic marginalisation but also by deeply embedded cultural norms, gender roles, and community practices that influence their access to education and empowerment. In Telangana, Room to Read has built technical assistance partnerships with the Telangana Tribal Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society (TTWREIS) and Samagra Shiksha, reaching over 70,000 children with life skills education, while also contextualising and printing life skills modules for Grades 6–10 in collaboration with SCERT.

Despite this programmatic momentum, a critical evidence gap remains: there is limited systematic understanding of the cultural, social, and gender dynamics specific to tribal communities in these two states — dynamics that fundamentally shape how life skills education is received, adapted, and sustained at the community and institutional level. This landscape study is intended to generate contextual evidence on tribal cultures, gender norms, and community practices in Chhattisgarh and Telangana, and to examine how these dynamics interact with the delivery and uptake of life skills programming. Findings will inform the design of more contextually responsive, gender-transformative approaches for Room to Read's ongoing and future technical assistance in both states.

2.1 Rationale of the Assignment:

The UNESCO Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report 2026 flags that 273 million children and youth remain out of school globally, with marginalized and vulnerable learners left furthest behind — a pattern sharply visible in the tribal belts of Chhattisgarh and Telangana. Nationally, the literacy rate of Scheduled Tribes stands at 59%, against an overall rate of 73% (Census 2011). Within Chhattisgarh, where Scheduled Tribes constitute 31% of the population, tribal literacy stands at just 50% (Census 2011). In Telangana, school attendance falls sharply from 96% among children aged 6–14 to 78% among the 15–17 age group (NFHS-4, 2015–16), and only 24% of women have completed 12 or more years of schooling — with rural women recording the least improvement nationally in educational attainment between NFHS-4 and NFHS-5 (NFHS-5, 2019–21). On retention, 79.9% of girls in Chhattisgarh do not complete higher secondary education (NFHS-5, 2019–21), and nationally, nearly 3 million adolescent girls dropped out of school between 2019 and 2024 (UDISE+, 2024). Telangana continues to record child marriage rates above the national average of 23.3% (NFHS-5, 2019–21), and ranks among the lowest states on the Women's Empowerment Index, reflecting systemic deficits in decision-making, economic participation, and gender-role perceptions (NFHS-5, 2019–21). Ground-level evidence from Chhattisgarh further shows that gender inequality among tribal adolescents is not absent but deeply normalized — invisible until surfaced through culturally rooted, community-connected approaches (Girl Rising, RISE Program, Chhattisgarh, 2025).

Yet data alone does not tell the full story. Numbers reveal the scale of exclusion but not its texture — the specific cultural practices, community hierarchies, gender negotiations, and social norms that shape it. This landscape study is an attempt to move from aggregate evidence to ground-level insight, and from insight to more contextually responsive, gender-transformative program design.

3. Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs): A Cultural and Social Overview:

Among India's Scheduled Tribes, Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs) represent a distinct and more precarious sub-category — identified not merely by tribal status but by markers of acute vulnerability: pre-agricultural or forest-dependent livelihoods, stagnant or declining populations, and persistently low literacy and health indicators. This classification exists precisely because more developed and assertive tribal communities tend to absorb a disproportionate share of tribal welfare resources, leaving PVTGs further marginalised even within the broader Scheduled Tribe population. In both Chhattisgarh and Telangana, this layered vulnerability shapes the cultural and social terrain that Room to Read's life skills programming must navigate.

T elangana : PVTG communities in Telangana — Chenchu, Koya, Yanadi, Gond, and Lambada — are served through dedicated PVTG residential schools, kept separate from mainstream tribal welfare institutions, a structural acknowledgment that their starting point differs meaningfully from both the general population and other, more assimilated Scheduled Tribes. These communities retain occupational patterns rooted in forest-based subsistence, hunting-gathering traditions, or shifting cultivation, and their social and spiritual life remains centred on the veneration of village goddesses and deities. Health and wellbeing are f