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Empowering India’s adolescents has long been one of the most significant of India’s development challenges. Despite India being home to more adolescents than any other country, many of them face adverse social and economic challenges that complicate their transition from childhood to adulthood.

Dasra is catalyzing India’s strategic philanthropy movement to transform a billion lives with dignity and equity since 1999. The 10to19: Dasra Adolescents Collaborative (DAC) is a high-impact platform that unites funders, technical experts, the government, and social organizations to reach 5 million adolescents, and move the needle on four outcomes key to adolescent empowerment: delaying age at marriage; delaying age of first pregnancy/birth; completing secondary education; and increasing agency.

DAC employs a two-pronged approach to directly reach adolescents through holistic and scalable programs implemented by Aangan Trust, Quest Alliance, Centre for Catalyzing Change and Child in Need Institute to achieve the four key outcomes at the state level in Jharkhand. Simultaneously, DAC is also building a national movement to make adolescents a priority by anchoring a Community of Practice, comprising of adolescent focused non-profits who collaborate on insights and data focused projects, exchange learnings, and work on collective advocacy interventions and solutions.

DAC is supported by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, Kiawah Trust, Tata Trusts and USAID, among others.