Half The Sky Games

Half The Sky Games

Header-HTS

Half The Sky Foundation (USA) with support from USAID, C-Change and Games for Change approached ZMQ to develop ideas on games on social issues for women. ZMQ did the full cycle of researching, designing, developing and implementing a set of 4 mobile games in India and Africa to create awareness on basic women and girl child rights & practices like education, de-worming, pregnancy, de-worming, early marriage, teenage pregnancies and family values in the developing world.

Half the Sky – Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide is a book written by New York Times editor Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, which argues that the oppression of women worldwide is “the paramount moral challenge” of the present era, much as the fight against slavery was in the past. Half the Sky focuses on sex trafficking, maternal mortality, sexual violence, micro-finance and girls education; and introduces real stories of women from India, Pakistan, Vietnam and Kenya; and highlights how bravely they fought to rise above very difficult circumstances. Their stories expose the blight caused by various factors like sex trafficking, forced prostitution, maternal mortality, and gender-based violence and how microfinance and female education can help.

The games developed for “Half the Sky” movement were developed in Hindi for India and Kiswahili for Kenya. This was all done through low-cost phone java games in Hindi and local languages. Later more games and stories were developed in Android for India and Kenya. The objective of the project is to create awareness through story-telling and decision making games, and create a behavior change in retaining more girls in schools who were unable to pursue education primarily due to social circumstances, and brings back education into hands of girls confined to homes.