– M Rafi Ahmed
So goes the words of wisdom from the last messenger Prophet Muhammad ﷺ on girls education – Girl children come with great rewards and blessings. If you offer care, love, support and education to your girl child, Paradise awaits you. Perhaps taking a cue from this, Safeena Husain, the founder of Educate Girls, an NGO actively involved in bringing back the dropout girls into classrooms is making waves in enrolling girls across different schools.
Making heads turn is 54-year old Safeena Husain’s NGO ‘Educate Girls’ headquartered in Mumbai which has created history of sorts in bagging the coveted Manila based Ramon Magsaysay Award. Interestingly, Educate Girls is the first outfit from India to get the honour. Founded in 2007, the group has helped enrol over 2 million out-of-school girls, expanding from just 50 villages to more than 30,000 as of now.
Browsing through the pages of Educate Girls, it revealed that the organisation through initiatives like Vidya for girls’ education and Pragati for adolescent girls and young women, and with the support of thousands of grassroots volunteers has transformed access to learning and opportunity for countless children in India.
A social impact leader, Safeena Husain is the Founder and Board Member of Educate Girls aimed at empowering communities for girls’ education in some of India’s hardest-to-reach villages.
It may be noted that recently Safeena received an honorary doctorate from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) for her service to society more so on girls education. This adds to her remarkable achievement in 2023, when she became the first Indian woman to be honoured as a WISE Prize laureate for her contributions to girls’ education in rural India.
A true visionary, Safeena’s desire for bold and ambitious impact is backed by a good sense of ground reality. Her lived experience gives her a unique perspective on the problems she is trying to solve. And true to her style, her next big goal is to empower 10 million learners over the next 10 years. Since its foundation in 2007, Educate Girls has achieved remarkable success, mobilising over 1.8 million girls for enrolment and supporting over 2.2 million students with remedial learning. The organisation works with thousands of community-based gender champions in some of the most rural, remote, and marginalised communities in India to break the cycle of inequality and exclusion.
Under Safeena’s guidance, Educate Girls has become a leading force globally, harnessing innovative financing and technology to bridge the gender gap in education. Under her leadership, Educate Girls delivered the world’s first Development Impact Bond in education, an outcomes-based financing model that achieved extraordinary results in both enrolment and learning.
She had led Educate Girls to become Asia’s first TED Audacious Project, a collaborative funding initiative focusing on scaling solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges. Safeena was conferred the NITI Aayog Women Transforming India Award and has received global accolades, including the USAID Millennium Alliance Award, MIT Solve’s Learning for Girls & Women Challenge, Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, and the World Bank India Development Marketplace Award. Safeena grew up in New Delhi and is an alumnus of the London School of Economics.
Educate Girls focuses on mobilising communities for girls’ education in India’s rural and educationally backward areas. In a step further, the organisation in partnership with state governments, has mobilised girl students from 29,000 villages across Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar. By engaging with a huge base of community volunteers, using predictive analytics and machine learning, Educate Girls helps to identify, enrol, and retain out-of-school girls and improves foundational skills in literacy and numeracy for all children.
[The author is former Indian Express and Deccan Chronicle chief]
