
MukkaMaar classes started with just 4 girls on a Mumbai beach

The number of girls grew to 100 and MTV created a video on Women's day that gained ~1M views. The video also won the Promax award.

It started with 9 year old Nabila and Saniya participating in a district level Wushu tournament and winning both, the gold and silver. By the end of the year, girls brought home 14 medals at the district and state level. Their pictures were also in the local newspaper.

MukkaMaar was invited by a NGO run government school in Juhu, to conduct MukkaMaar classes during school hours for 300 students.

After a successful pilot, with the support of school leaders we established a partnership with BMC with access to all their 1100+ schools.

MukkaMaar was finally registered as a Charitable Trust under Maharashtra Public Trusts Act, with a vision to build agency in adolescent girls.

6 girls participated in Suburban District Level Wushu Competition and won 2 golds, 2 silver and 2 bronze medals. Pooja Jadhav also won the ‘Best Fighter’ trophy.

6 girls went for State Level Wushu competition to Aurangabad, and came back with 3 medals. More than the medals, what matters, is that girls who were not allowed to even step outside, went to another city!

We moved fast with developing a Trainer training program, recruitment of trainers, and by November, we were teaching ~1800 girls across 33 BMC schools.

We celebrated International Women’s day through an Inter-school competition across our schools, in group demos, poems and debates, and saw an attendance of more than 500 girls along with approximately 200 parents and teachers. There were more than 250 participants and the event was graced by Shabana Azmi as the guest of honour.

MukkaMaar was selected from ~500 applications into the Nudge incubator.

With continued efforts, we reached 75 BMC schools, with ~3000 girls enrolled. Girls in schools had begun to speak openly about harassment, without shame, and reported responding positively and assertively to threats.

We celebrated International Women’s day through an Inter-school competition across our schools. This time, we saw an attendance of ~2000 people (girls, parents, teachers). The event was graced by celebrities like Richa Chadha.

While offline operations came to a standstill, our team continued online sessions with girls we were connected online with and started volunteering with Khana Chahiye (KC) for relief activities. Our team worked on fundraising and needs analysis for KC. Overall, we facilitated the delivery of ration for ~1000 families in Andheri and Malad, (Mumbai).

MukkaMaar was selected as part of UnLtd India's incubation program at the growth stage.

Leveraging the department of Physical Education, which has 315 PT teachers in Mumbai, we began training them on gender equitable PE pedagogy for the department with a vision to implement MukkaMaar program through existing infrastructure. This would be a long (2-3 year) project as we intend to measure impact at the child level, and not just teacher level.

Our online program 'Chal Ab MukkaMaar' saw a reach of 11K unique logins, with significant shift in knowledge and skills.

After trying various digital mediums, we piloted a WhatsApp based program (done manually through groups and individual messages), and realised that if content is engaging and there's some element of gamification, learning can take place in a self-paced low-tech environment. We partnered with Glific, to build on our vision of this program.

We launched our first third part impact report conducted by Illume. The qualitative research focussed on finding 'how' change is enabled through MukkaMaar.

Ishita was recognised as 'Social Entrepreneur of the Year' under the rising star category, by Financial Express and FICCI Flo.

Concluded the third party evaluation to measure the effectiveness of the WhatsApp based program POWER with Mukki, with promising results. By this time we had reached 16K girls through our online classes 'Chal ab MukkaMaar'.

POWER with Mukki was recognised as a Top Technological Innovation, along with a USD 10K grant, by ADPC, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation & FICCI.

Started offline classes again with 526 girls across 10 schools.

Offline reach expanded to 1500 girls across 36 schools in Mumbai.