Educate Girls works to reform government schools for girls’ education by leveraging existing community and government resources.
There are more girls not in school in India than in any other country in the world.
Educate Girls reaches out to village leaders and creates both demand and support for better education.
Safeena Husain envisions strong communities holding government and schools accountable for quality girls’ education.
Almost a million children in six of the lowest-performing districts have experienced better education to date.
Every day in India, over 4.1 million girls of school age do not show up to classrooms where they belong. These are classrooms that could, if entered, have positive effects upon the girls’ health and wealth, and livelihood of their families and communities. Yet these girls do not show up because of myriad reasons that relate to one thing: their gender.
Mobilizing public, private, and community resources to provide quality education for all underserved and marginalized girls. Using innovative analytic techniques to build a predictive model (e.g., machine learning) to identify villages for future program sites with the highest concentrations of out-of-school girls.
Founder & Executive Director, Educate Girls Foundation
Safeena, a London School of Economics graduate, has worked extensively with rural and urban under-served communities in South America, Africa and Asia. As a girl in Delhi, Safeena Husain found refuge and opportunity in her education. She went on to study in the UK before building a career in community-based global development, including seven years as executive director of Child Family Health International, an NGO based in the US. Her work in development spans more than 15 years, working on projects to serve rural and urban communities in Ecuador, Mexico, Bolivia and South Africa. In 2004, she returned to India to satisfy her commitment to girls’ education and accepted an acquaintance’s invitation to assist a struggling girls’ education program, quickly turning it around. In 2007, she founded Educate Girls to further develop her model and scale its impact. Educate Girl’s funders and board members describe her as “incredibly bright,” determined, and clever, with a “big heart” and “illuminating authenticity” that draws people to her and Educate Girls. She is “always up for a challenge,” as shown in decisions for Educate Girls to work in the most off-track geographies first and to implement the first education Development Impact Bond (DIB).
As part of the Audacious Project, Safeena gave a talk on Educate Girls’ program and her vision to enroll 1.5 million out-of-school-girls back in school by 2024 at TED 2019.
Over the last decade, Safeena’s work through Educate Girls has been recognized on numerous national and international platforms. In 2019, Safeena was awarded with Beyond the Business Award at the Economic Times Prime Women Leadership Awards. Previously, Safeena has won the 2017 Niti Aayog Women Transforming India Award and the 2016 NDTV-L’Oréal Paris Women of Worth Award in the Education Category. Under her leadership, Educate Girls has also won the 2014 WISE Award, the 2014 USAID Millennium Alliance Award, the 2014 Stars Impact Award, and the British Asian Trust’s Special Recognition Award from Prince Charles for outstanding contribution in education.
Educate Girls launched and successfully implemented the world’s first Development Impact Bond (DIB) in education in partnership with UBS Optimus Foundation and Children’s Investment Fund (CIF) in Bhilwara, Rajasthan. This three year (2015-18) project tied funds to pure outcomes and was intended to be a proof of concept. The final year results, declared in July, 2018 showed that Educate Girls DIB surpassed its target outcomes with 160 percent of the final learning target and 116 percent of the final enrolment target achieved. In early 2019, Educate Girls was chosen as one of eight Audacious Projects for their idea to solve almost half of India’s problem of girls who are out of school by bringing up to 1.5 million of these girls back to school by 2024. This makes Educate Girls the first Asian and the only Indian nonprofit ever to have been chosen as one of the Audacious ideas.
How do social enterprises and the funders that support them achieve impact at scale even in times of acute crisis? This is the question that prompted the Scaling Pathways partners—Skoll Foundation, Mercy Corps…
What internal and external levers can social enterprises activate to finance impact at scale? Root Capital on the challenges of blending colors of money inside an organization: Willy Foote, the…
Climate and health took center stage at the 74th session of the UN General Assembly last week in New York—the annual gathering of nearly 200 world leaders with a…
Educate Girls, an Indian NGO working to enroll out-of-school girls and increase learning for girls and boys, recently reached a major milestone: completion of the world’s first Development Impact Bond…
Two years into a pioneering three-year development impact bond (DIB), Educate Girls—which tackles gender inequality in India’s educational system, is showing promising results. With a DIB, a service provider receives…
