"I can do official work two times better than the man," says Navya proudly. "Though it is hard to do official and domestic work too, women have the capacity to do it."

If only they had the chance. In India, like in many other parts of the developing world, gender equality is an uphill battle, and the earliest signs of this disempowerment manifest themselves in the scarcity of educational and professional development opportunities that are available to women.

One of the three principal challenges to the acquisition of new media literacies (NMLs) is the participation gap, which Henry Jenkins describes as "the unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills and knowledge that will prepare youth for full participation in the world of tomorrow." In the case of young women in India and in other developing countries, the participation gap goes beyond restricted access; it is a question of stunted self-efficacy and muffled voices.

In this research community, we talk about the participation gap in terms of the students' acquisition of NML skills, yet, in my personal experience in international education, I have found that it similarly applies to teachers, and especially to female educators. The teachers that are placed in public schools are victims of the same inequality of access that characterizes their students. Compared to Western teachers, or even educators in private schools, the teachers in government schools are denied the professional development opportunities that allow them to take part in meaningful communities - digital and non-digital alike - and to cultivate the NML skills that they hope to pass down to their students.

For this reason, I cannot insist enough on the crucial nature of equitable, culturally relevant teacher training programs, and particularly NML professional development initiatives such as PLAY!. Training local teachers in these skills not only helps alleviate the participation gap that is hindering their personal and professional enrichment, but also builds program sustainability, to ensure a scalable and responsible implementation of NML initiatives abroad.

Before starting my doctoral program at USC Annenberg, I worked in India as the field coordinator of The Modern Story (TMS), a non-profit organization that teaches digital storytelling to children of daily wage workers from traditionally underserved religious and caste minorities, helping them acquire 21st century technological skills while sharing stories of personal, social and environmental relevance. Having identified the problem of the participation gap and its disempowering effects on young girls and female teachers alike, we piloted an NML professional development program that trained young female teachers in NML pedagogy and then placed them in classrooms in all-girls public schools.

We managed to do this through a fantastic collaboration with Technology for the People (TFTP), which made me realize the potential of capitalizing on the target population's practical skills to build NML capacity. A paragon of social innovation, TFTP is a Hyderabad-based NGO that taps into the creative potential of young Muslim women (aged 18-22), who are skilled in Henna tattoos and silk embroidery, by training them in multimedia software and animation as a strategy of social and economic empowerment. Identifying our strikingly similar core values and objectives, TMS and TFTP collaborated to design a symbiotic program that simultaneously aided these two underserved population segments (female public school students and, respectively, young Muslim women), with a focus on education and livelihood promotion as inextricably linked processes. After training the TFTP women in NMLs through the use of multimedia "hard" and "soft" technologies, as well as in the pedagogy of implementing such curricula in schools, TMS employed these young women as teachers in government schools, working alongside TMS fellows. The women thus gained valuable professional experience, and a sustainable income, which offers economic freedom, confidence, and social independence in their conservative Muslim communities.

Putting their NML skills in action, during their professional development sessions, the young women created a video explaining the training they are receiving in their own words. The video was written, filmed and edited entirely by them, as a culmination of their training module:

The principal problems for these Muslim women living in the Hyderabad slums relate to the oppressive, patriarchal environment they live in. They are forced to drop out of school at young ages and take up full-time domestic and craft work, usually within the confines of their homes. However, they sustain their hunger for learning and self-betterment and have overcome substantial obstacles to continue the TFTP and TMS training; many of them commute for hours by bus to reach the center, many had to defy their families and suffer verbal and physical abuse from their fathers, brothers, and husbands.

Teaching these young women how to use technologies of such current relevance and hone their NML skills is an enormous step towards their individual empowerment, professional development and economic independence. By offering them employment that brings a secure monthly income, they can escape the "time poverty" trap by contributing to their families in ways other than performing domestic chores and craftwork. Because of the patriarchal norms that characterize these women's conservative Muslim environment, their families often prohibit them from working in the commercial media and animation industries, as it requires being in public atmospheres around men. Our project aimed to work around this social prohibition by providing them with jobs that are seen as highly respectable for women: teaching in all-girls government schools. This new-found economic self-reliance and mode of expression gives these women self-confidence; they are able to transcend social boundaries that limit their development. Beyond their vocational and professional development, the training greatly enhanced their status in their communities, as they learned to act as role models to the younger generation of girls in these conservative Muslim neighborhoods.