- 4 months ago
The landscape of India’s development sector, Safeena Husain has emerged as a transformative force. As the founder of Educate Girls, she and her team have worked tirelessly to bring out-of-school girls back into classrooms, often confronting entrenched social barriers.
This year, Educate Girls became the first Indian non-profit to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia’s highest honour for public service. With unwavering determination, strategic insight, and a compelling presence, Safeena has reshaped conversations around girls’ education.
Watch Safeena Husain in conversation with National Herald's Vanshika Gupta to learn more about her journey and vision.
This year, Educate Girls became the first Indian non-profit to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia’s highest honour for public service. With unwavering determination, strategic insight, and a compelling presence, Safeena has reshaped conversations around girls’ education.
Watch Safeena Husain in conversation with National Herald's Vanshika Gupta to learn more about her journey and vision.
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00:00Today we are joined by Safina Hussain, founder of Educate Girls, a non-profit working to bring
00:07out-of-school girls back into classrooms and improve learning outcomes in some of India's
00:12most underserved communities. And this year, Educate Girls became the first Indian non-profit
00:18to win the Ramon Max Tessay Award, often called Asia's Nobel Prize. And we are here to learn
00:25more about her journey, the challenges of girls' education, and what this recognition means
00:31for India's civil society. Hello, Safina. So I'd just like to start with looking back at
00:41your journey. And it's been a long journey from 2007 to now. What are some of the challenges
00:49or some of the things that have changed over the years?
00:52So many things have changed on the ground, right? So I have to say, when we first started
01:01working in Pali district in Rajasthan, it was, you know, you'd go and talk to parents and
01:07they'd be like, yes, I'm happy to send my child to school, but where are the schools? Because
01:11the schools used to be at a distance. And so we had to do all these things like running
01:15bridge courses, residential bridge camps, because access to schooling itself was a big challenge
01:22at that time, right? And so with the Right to Education Act, that is something that gave us a
01:27big tailwind. Because then we'd be like, listen, there is a school and there's a primary school
01:32within a kilometer of the village, and there is a middle school within three kilometers of the
01:35village. And that change was transformational, especially in very rural and remote areas.
01:41And any areas where we'd find that there should be a school and there wasn't, you could actually
01:44talk to the district administration and get, you know, a school started there. So that was
01:51a big, big, big change, I would say, in our work. The second really big one came with the launch
01:58of the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao campaign. Because beforehand, I think it took us an enormous amount
02:05of energy and just convincing people that girls' education is important. But with a national campaign,
02:10with, you know, every poster and everything having that slogan, that conversation, I have to say,
02:16became much easier in some ways to have. At least it was, it was a given that girls' education is
02:23important. And now let's just get into how we solve for your particular problem that you may be
02:28facing. And I also have to say, there's a third thing. And that was for, that was really a big change
02:36that I think has been transformative, specifically for tribal girls.
02:40Is the start of the residential schools, the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyale. These are residential
02:46schools for girls, you know, they get provided with everything. Everything is taken care of,
02:51completely free. And that has actually also been really good, because parents who are migrating,
02:57who go off and then, you know, or the girl is alone at home, and they have so many concerns.
03:02Now, at least for those girls, there is a residential facility. There's one in each block,
03:07especially in the educationally backward blocks. And that has also given a massive tailwind. So those
03:13are some of the infrastructure changes that we have seen, and advocacy changes, right, in terms of just the campaign.
03:19And that has actually been quite transformative on the ground.
03:23Since your work has kind of, it's been in partnership with state government, governments, and I was curious to know, have there been any instances of resistance or pushback from local leaders or political actors?
03:38How has that negotiation sort of panned out? Because I understand that with infrastructure, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of bringing kids to school.
03:49And there's a mindset also attached with it, in terms of sending girls, girl children to school, especially. So how has the work been? Or what are the negotiations that have had to be made in that space?
04:03I think, see, there are challenges, setbacks, or the resistance is actually on all fronts. Because the way Educate Girls is working, if you think about it, we don't control or own anything.
04:17Everything is through partnership and influence, right? You don't control the community. And so therefore, you have to change those mindsets through dialogue and through constantly, gently kind of influencing and taking people along on a journey.
04:31You don't control the schools. So you better be working really in partnership with the school administration, with the school management committees, with the teachers, because they don't have to work with you, right?
04:42So, and then finally, the government, again, there is no control. If they don't want to, they don't have to work with us. They can just shut the door in our face.
04:49So actually, across all of Educate Girls as stakeholders, there is always going to be resistance. There's always going to be challenge.
04:57And however, we are mobilizers at heart. That is what this organization really is. Our heart beats for the girl child. And we will mobilize whoever is required. And that mobilization, the only way we can do it, Vanshika, is by finding common ground.
05:13And that's what you do at a community level, at, you know, at a school level, or at a government level. And at a government level, because you asked for that specifically, I think finding ground, common ground is easier, because they have also signed on to the sustainable development goals.
05:28That's exactly what we are working for. They also want to see all the girls in school, you know, they've got a national campaign going, we want exactly the same thing.
05:36So at least there's goal alignment. Um, and therefore you can have a dialogue and you can actually have an authentic, uh, partnership and collaboration.
05:47And, uh, because I'm speaking of sort of also understanding that the Education Girls runs on the efforts of team Balikas and a lot of field staff.
05:58So I also was curious to know what kinds of invisible labor also goes in sustaining this work that the world doesn't see.
06:06Yeah, that's a beautiful question, by the way, I love that because there is the labor that is involved, which is significant, right?
06:15You, we go door to door and we knock on every single door in the village, just that in itself.
06:22Right. And, and sometimes those doors can be on the top of a mountain. Sometimes they can be across the river and our team Balikas and our frontline staff are there for every last door.
06:32So no girl, our whole thing is, we're constantly panicking saying, did we miss somebody out? Was there a girl, you know, behind that mountain and, uh, that we didn't see.
06:42And there's maybe one house there that we have missed. So there's that constant sort of, um, piece.
06:47And that requires an enormous amount of labor, uh, that requires an enormous amount of effort.
06:52And it's not like you just have to go once. You have to go multiple times today.
06:56There was nobody in the house tomorrow. They were there, but they want you to talk to the mother and daughter.
07:01They want you to talk to somebody else. Like it's a constant piece. Right.
07:04But I think your question is really beautiful, like about the invisible labor that we don't see.
07:09Um, and that's kind of given me a little bit pause. Um, and so thinking about that, I think we have to understand that we at educate girls are in the business of optimism and action.
07:23Um, and how do you, that, that, you know, that effort to constantly keep your hope up that today, they didn't talk to us, but tomorrow they will.
07:35Right. However, many doors that kind of shut in your face, but to be back again and again, I think that keeping that hope alive, keeping that optimism, and then converting that into action on a daily basis, I would say is the sort of invisible labor.
07:53Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for that. It's, it's really good to know and good to hear. Uh, and I want to sort of now backtrack to about how you started this and you've often spoken about your own interrupted education when you've talked about the work.
08:08And I was curious to know that as a woman leader, what other lived experiences that shape the way you approach glass, grassroot work, for example, your class, class positionality, gender, and even privilege that comes with it.
08:23And how do you then sort of navigate being both an insider because of your tremendous work with communities and also as an outsider who is sort of urban educated and has so much global exposure and experience. So, yeah.
08:38Gosh, you're killing me with your questions. This is again, a really, really fabulous one. Um, I think this sort of, we are seeing the world in sort of black and white, right? There's urban and rural and this is okay. And that is not, and they are, um, they're not sending their daughters. And we are like, I think there is that sort of perception, right? Uh, one of the things that I feel, and which also helps me navigate across, um,
09:06these very extreme, um, these very extreme, um, sort of places is this absolute belief that patriarchy, we're not that different because patriarchy stains us all.
09:19Some way it's a light pink and somewhere it's a deep red, right? It's just the shade, which is different. So whether you are, um, you know, even in, in your own homes and urban homes, uh, and if the doorbell rings, who gets up to open the door?
09:36You know, you know, majority of the time I'm saying if every member is, there is patriarchy, even in the smallest thing like that for every working woman who's in an urban area, right?
09:46She's stepping out to make a million dollar pitch. And as soon as she closes that door, she's thinking that again is the stain of patriarchy in a way, right? That you, you carry that.
09:59You carry that. So whether you are in an urban environment, whether you are in, um, a rural environment, the, the patriarchal norms are still the same.
10:09The fight is still the same. Uh, the struggle is, is kind of the same. So I would say I navigated by keeping that gender lens on and you have to unlearn in every surrounding and you have to learn in every surrounding.
10:20Um, this question of the insider outsider, I think that's also a fabulous question. Um, I think as a, we, our work is as an insider because it is community driven.
10:32It's driven by the tens of thousands of Team Balika volunteers we have on the ground. And so it's not like that Vanshika and Safina went to somebody's door and knocked on it and lectured them about sending their daughters to school.
10:44Right. It is. And, uh, like they have their own slogan, which is, um, that it's my village, my problem, and I'm the solution.
10:54So the entire model, 95% of the people who work in this organization are from the same villages, same block, districts, states, they come from the same lived experiences.
11:04And so therefore everything is run by and through community ownership and community voices and led by the community, um, from an outsider lens, specifically, let's say my own lens of having the urban exposure and a global exposure.
11:20I would say that has actually helped me. Um, that exposure has helped me in ways of how the foundation of the model was, um, was laid.
11:32So that outsider lens is a learning lens that you can bring to your work.
11:37So for example, I worked in the Amazon jungle, which for tribes, right?
11:41So when I came to India and I started this work, I had worked in areas where you have 40 homes in the jungle and then you walk two days and then another 40 homes.
11:50So working in rural and tribal wasn't a new thing for me.
11:54Uh, I was actually very comfortable.
11:56I kind of knew, um, how to navigate and how to set up strong models, um, even in the remotest of areas.
12:05Actually, I'm more comfortable building.
12:07I have no experience of working in urban areas.
12:09I'm only comfortable building, designing, scaling.
12:12Um, so I think that outsider perspective, um, actually has helped me to build the model the way it is today.
12:20All of those learnings I was able to, to bring to the table, but the organization, the way it runs is completely, um, an insider perspective.
12:29It's from, uh, run by the people, you know, from the same areas.
12:33Uh, you've spoken about, uh, the three P's often, and you've spoken, spoken about poverty, patriarchy, and policy.
12:45Uh, so if you had to sort of think of the least discussed problem or hindrance or barrier to girls' education in India, how would you sort of describe it?
12:56What would you say?
12:59Yeah.
13:00I think, yeah.
13:01And I think that's a, again, very good question.
13:03Um, I think we, uh, you know, like as, as a physician, sometimes you're treating the symptoms without looking at the disease.
13:11Like, so if you're a physician, you want to look at what the disease is rather than just saying, I'm going to treat your fever or I'm going to cheat.
13:17You know, they'll do a blood test and say, actually it's malaria, it's whatever.
13:20And I think in gender programming, if I had to put a lens, cause sometimes we only see what is in the front.
13:26Um, but, um, to your question, I think the biggest challenge and where the treatment has to be provided is three areas.
13:36One is aspiration building, what I call aspiration confidence and support.
13:41First of all, girls don't have aspiration because we never build it for them because their parents and their gatekeepers also don't have any aspiration for them.
13:48All of these things.
13:56So first is that we are lacking an aspiration for our women and girls.
14:00Um, and therefore she has no aspiration from her for herself.
14:04Second is confidence.
14:06If you don't have aspiration, then you don't have confidence.
14:08And sometimes it's a mixed match.
14:10Maybe the girl has confidence, but the parents don't have confidence.
14:13So how do you make sure that the girl and the family and the community has confidence in that girl?
14:19And the third is about the support.
14:21We need to make sure that we provide her with the support.
14:25Sometimes the girl has both aspiration and confidence, but the family is not supportive and therefore she can't.
14:31So that is the treatment is aspiration, confidence and support that has to be delivered to the girl, but also to her gatekeepers, to her family and us as a community.
14:43So that's how I would say is we don't talk about it enough.
14:45Uh, but that is what I find is to be the underlying basis, um, of all gender issues and therefore, um, or gender programming.
14:55What, what kind of things have you then sort of heard from girls returning to school after dropping out?
15:01And what do they themselves sort of say about their experiences, uh, of being back in school and being back at it?
15:08Yeah.
15:09I, and I think I'm going to break it down.
15:11One is how the girls feel about themselves.
15:14Right.
15:15And especially I've had girls who've been out of school for eight years, 10 years, sitting at home and thought, this is all that life has to offer.
15:23But when you come back, you do your 10th and suddenly you're like, my job can apply.
15:26I can apply for a loan also if I wanted, like, you know, a little girl, she wanted to run her shop.
15:31And she says, but I want a bank loan to buy more stock and to get a formal bank loan.
15:38I need a 10 certificate.
15:39Like they find that they're blocked, you know, in so many ways.
15:42So one is just that own personal transformation, their own aspiration goes up.
15:46Their confidence, um, goes up.
15:48A girl was telling me how, uh, she was so proud.
15:51I asked her, I said, give me one thing that changed for you.
15:54And she says, and he wanted to buy a property and because he's so far away.
16:00And, but he said, she will look at the contract.
16:03She'll go and see if the house is okay.
16:05She can put the deposit down.
16:07And she said, how much confidence he had in me.
16:09And that to her is that respect, respect from her brother that she's seeing because she's educated.
16:16I have to tell you this story.
16:17I just met this one, came back to education after a long time, just passed her 10th grade.
16:22And as it happens, her son also took the 10th grade exam this year.
16:25Okay.
16:26And she told me, she said, I scored more than him.
16:29He goes to school.
16:30I studied on my own.
16:31I sit in a camp on the floor on a dheri.
16:34I also do the housework.
16:35And she's like, my son is saying, how did you do it?
16:38And for her, just the fact that her son respects her and he's looking at her with very different eyes today.
16:48That's the self transformation that we see.
16:52Right.
16:53And then you have their families.
16:54I mean, I also, I see the negative side of it a little bit.
16:57Families are like,
16:59the families are seeing that voice and that agency kind of, we always smile when we hear that because we're like, that's a good thing.
17:07Because she now knows that she's able to put her voice across.
17:12But we see parents who say, you know, I went back to meet this girl and her father started lecturing me about girls' education.
17:19His daughter was out of school and we had to struggle with him so much.
17:23But now she's married.
17:24She's working as an Anganwari worker.
17:26And then he said to me, he says, you have to educate all the girls because today the world is built for the educated.
17:32If you're not educated, you will be exploited like animals.
17:35And I was like, thank you for telling me this.
17:37But that's the change that you see is a change in conversation in families.
17:42And that's a change in conversation around the communities as well.
17:46Right.
17:47So that's the big shift that you see from the self to family and then to the community.
17:53And it's quite dramatic.
17:54It's amazing to see that slip like in a year of, you know, that your life can change so much.
18:01Yeah, it's so good to hear these anecdotes because often when you think of what would be the outcomes of an intervention,
18:08you think of very measurable outcomes, increase in enrollment, so and so number of girls are coming in and so forth.
18:15So also in the sector and the space that you work in, I was curious to know how do you engage with donors and funders?
18:22Because there is a certain amount of measurable outcomes that you can show, but the impact is so massive.
18:28It's not just in numbers.
18:29It's changing and transforming lives of so many women, so many households.
18:35And I know about the first ever development impact bond in education that Educate Girls also talks about and works with.
18:46So I was curious to know what you think of funding and outcomes and so on.
18:52Yeah. Yeah. No. And I think again, for me, it really comes back down to the girl, right?
18:58The genesis of the world's first development impact bond in education, which by the way, people said you can't do it in India.
19:04You guys are data poor. Even if it's evaluated, who will believe your results?
19:08Like it was, it took me three years of struggle to even be able to pilot a payment by results transaction.
19:14Imagine like I'm saying to you, Manchika, pay me after I deliver the results.
19:18You're like, hmm, I don't, how will I believe it? Like it was just kind of insane.
19:24And it's also like a great story. It's an India story, right? Like we, and it was run in Rajasthan.
19:30It was run in a rural area. It had a gold standard evaluation that showed that, you know, over like 92% of the girls were brought back into school and were staying in school.
19:40Learning outcomes were equal to an additional year of schooling.
19:43The world was kind of blown away and we made the transaction open source so that everybody else could follow it.
19:48And now there are 220 plus bonds in the world that are following in the footsteps, deploying almost a billion dollars worth of social impact capital.
19:56So it's been great. But the reason that we did it was not because of any of this.
20:02We did it because we wanted to, we know that there are large number of girls who are out of school.
20:07We understand that you don't want a program that is just simply replicated.
20:13You want a program that is actually replicating results.
20:17And so we wanted to measure it in a way, the payment by results, a performance-based contract.
20:22The goal was that we should be able to tie every donation to the results that it achieves, right?
20:29So if you give me a donation, you should know what is the results that this is having.
20:32And anecdotes are great, but you need hard numbers.
20:36And so we measure enrollment, retention, learning outcomes for all of our children, right?
20:41And that is what we hold ourselves accountable to and through external evaluations, through very, very, very rigorous evidence-backed studies.
20:49Because that's what you want to do is you want to identify all girls who are out of school.
20:53You want to make sure they're in school and staying.
20:55So that's your enrollment outcome and your retention outcome.
20:58And then you want to measure their learning and to see that they are actually moving forward.
21:02And it's the same with Pragati.
21:03We're looking at how many of our girls are coming into the program.
21:06How many of them are passing their tent.
21:08But we're also looking at saying how many got a new bank account, you know, which they didn't have before.
21:12How many got connected to social protection, social welfare schemes.
21:15So all of this together.
21:19But yes, we're very lucky that we have donors who support us in a, how should I say this?
21:27We're very, very lucky.
21:28We have long-term partners who have funded us for five years, 10 years, 15 years,
21:34because they follow our approach of problem solving, not actually being project-based, right?
21:40So the organization stays in a village six to eight years,
21:43because we want to see the problem close forever.
21:46You don't want to have to go back and do it again, right?
21:48If you work for six to eight years, you work with 10 cohorts, which is a generation.
21:53So we're very happy that our donors understand that education is a long-term business.
21:57Mindset change is a long-term business and actually support you through that.
22:02And that's when you see the multiplier effect of women and girls.
22:05And then you, the multiplier is massive through, you know,
22:08health outcomes and child marriage rates dropping and you name it.
22:12Nine of the 17 sustainable goals can be met if we just educated all our girls.
22:19Yeah. Thank you so much for, this is, I have no words because it's so huge.
22:24And the kind of, the way you're explaining it, it just breaks it down into so many multiple factors.
22:29I'll have to probably go back and read more on this.
22:32But apart from this, I just sort of want to come down to the last few questions that we have in terms of what does this award then mean for you in terms of also scalability or what will it, how will it impact your work and what, what next?
22:49Yeah. So this is actually, so in the last 18 years, just to put things in perspective, in the last 18 years, we have been able to mobilize over 2 million girls to come back into the classrooms where they belong.
23:04We have also improved learning outcomes for 2.4 million children.
23:09So that's been like, wow, great.
23:1118 years. Now over the next 10 years, we want to be even more ambitious and we want to be able to reach 10 million learners over the next.
23:20So it's a 10 by 10 strategy, 10 million learners in 10 years.
23:24But our ambition doesn't end there.
23:27You know, we don't just want scale.
23:30We actually also want depth and we want quality.
23:35So I'll give you an example.
23:36This year, the topper in the state open school exams in Rajasthan is a Pragati Girl, which is our second chance program.
23:44The topper in Madhya Pradesh is a Pragati Girl.
23:47So not only do we want the scale to get to 10 million, but we want all the toppers.
23:52We want quality.
23:53We want our girls to actually be doing really well in the exam.
23:57So we want to marry scale and quality and impact in a big way.
24:01And so we're setting ourselves some very, very ambitious goals.
24:09And just a last question to wrap it up.
24:11I think recognition at this scale also brings a lot of attention to you personally.
24:18And has that sort of visibility come with its challenges or has that only helped you to push more for your work and advocate more strongly?
24:25How has this whole experience been?
24:28Yeah, I think because we work, we are in the business of mindset change, right?
24:33We're in the business of girls' education and which is just here.
24:40So if India woke up tomorrow and magically believe that their sons and daughters were equal, you wouldn't even educate girls.
24:47Right.
24:48And that's it.
24:49It's just here.
24:50It's just that thinking.
24:51So the more visibility, the more we're able to talk about our story, the more we're able to get our message across and hopefully it changes some minds.
24:59So we're very grateful.
25:00We're very, very grateful for the attention that it is bringing to the cause and to our girls and their future.
25:12Thank you so much, Safina, for sharing these insights so generously.
25:15And yeah, this conversation, I think, has been a reminder of how deeply layered the struggle of girls' education is and how change is built through this big vision that you carry.
25:30And also this everyday invisible work that so many of your members, so many of your volunteers put in.
25:37And congratulations once again on the award and thank you so much for being with us today, Safina.
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