The COVID pandemic is a crisis that the world did not see coming. While it has affected everyone around the world, some people are more adversely hit than the others. Given that VOICE 4 Girls works predominantly with adolescents from lower socio-economic backgrounds, we wanted to reach out to them during the nationwide lockdown in India and check on them to see how they were doing. Thus, AWAAZ was born.

Launched on 6th April 2020, the campaign focused on reaching out to adolescent boys and girls from different districts of Telangana to understand how the pandemic had affected their lives, get to know their understanding of COVID, as well as any barriers faced regarding access to essential products such as pulses and other groceries, sanitary napkins, etc. Major findings from the campaign included high levels of anxiety among girls about continuing their education, loss of livelihoods of parents giving rise to increased emotional stress, domestic violence becoming commonplace in the communities, and a lack of access to sanitary napkins and other health necessities. We reached out to a total of 544 adolescent girls and 256 adolescent boys through AWAAZ.