These engineers left their jobs to develop a sex education curriculum

Written by Shyna Kalra | New Delhi | Published: January 31, 2020 4:58:01 pm

Divya and Madhuri – co-founders of ThatMate with children

When her niece asked Madhuri Yadav the same questions she once asked her own mother on hitting puberty, it made her realise that not much has changed since then. “Despite the advancement in education levels and exposure to the internet, teenagers today face the same questions and are rather even more confused than years ago. Especially answers to male puberty, emotional and relationship management skills are not being provided to young children, ” she remarked.

This motivated the then 32-year-old to leave her lucrative job as an engineer despite nearly a decade-long work experience and be ‘That Mate’ to her niece and others in her age group. Her start-up talks about topics not taught in school, from puberty, sexual, mental and emotional health to financial literacy.

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Two years on, That Mate has tied up with nearly 100 schools in Maharashtra and now finds itself in the shortlist for PwC’s Social Start-up fellowship (SSE) programme. Divya Shah, the co-founder, is pursuing the year-long fellowship, which has inspired the idea for a chat-bot called ‘Bolo’ and an interactive game.

The chat-bots will allow adolescents to connect with a counsellor via text or call round the clock, while the AI-powered game will help in identifying their issues. In the soon-to-be-released-game, players will be given a scenario wherein they will have to make choices to move ahead in the story. This, informed Shah, will help identify the aptitude of the player, their issues and as a result, they will receive appropriate and personalised guidance.

One of the workshops by the start-up

The start-up, which started by talking about adolescent issues through Facebook Live with help of experts, psychiatrists, psychologists, etc, created age-appropriate content for different age groups through comic books, games and audio-video content.

The target audience starts from classes 7-10, where they talk about puberty and changes it brings in both males and females bodies. For classes 9-10, the content includes concepts of relationships, consent, harassment, etc. The wider range of topics on social media, technology/game addiction, peer-pressure was for the age group of 18-21 years, as informed by Shah.

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“Teenagers today are more exposed to data than we were at their age, yet their parents are not able to answer their queries or the child is not comfortable expressing themselves openly. They end up asking their peers who are as clueless as them. While female puberty is much talked about, issues related to male puberty are still unaddressed. How to handle sexual attraction, manage relationships, game or mobile phone addiction, etc, are among most frequently asked queries by teenagers and they are often left to fend for themselves in these domains,” commented Yadav.

“We realised that students often don’t open up about issues including peer pressure, relationship, anger, parental issues, social emotional learning, and child abuse during workshops, but instead approached us later. Also, workshops were reaching a limited group. Thus, we decided to move on to an app and chatbot, where students can find the right kind of content,” she explained.

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