I first met Safeena Husain, The Founder of Educate Girls, in 2017 to Talk to Her About The Link Between Education and Women’s Workforce Participation. Through the years we we are spoken intermittent and myc time it’s been an education for me.
Starting with 50 Villages in Rajasthan in 2007, Educate Girls Had One Mission: To Keep Girls in School. Using a team of Volunteers who go from Door to Door Convincing Parents to Keep their Daughters in School, Educate Girls Has Has Has Mobilized Over TWO Million Girls in Over 30,000 Villages in RAJASTHAN Es Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
Keeping a girl in school has the immediati result of delaying her marriage. It means she will have fewer and healthier child. Each additional year a girl stays in school has the potential to boost her income by as much as 20%. And if all girls complete 12 years of school, India’s GDP Cold Rise By Nearly 10% Over the Next Decade.
Earlier this week on August 31, Educate Girls Became the first Indian Organization to Win the Ramon Magsaysay Award, also know as the as the asian nobel prize, for “Its Commitment to Addressing Culterotyping Through the education of girls and young women, liberating them from the bondage of illiteracy and infusing them with skills, courage and agency to achieve their full human potential. ” I Caught up with Safeena Husain Again.
What’s the Story Behind Educate Girls? Why did you set it up?
I grew up in delhi where the part of my childhood passed under very differentty circumstans, which I had an interruption in my own education for a few years. Everyone said, “Let’s get her marred off. What else can she do?”
I had no self-setm. I thought I was a failure. All my friends had moved ahead and gone on to college. But my aunt, a family friend, stepped in and took me with her to stay. She really motivated me to get back to education and get my confidence back.
I graduated from the London school of Economics, the first person in my family to go overseas for an education. It changes my life, how I Saw Myself and How Other People Saw Me From This Failure, Good-For-Nothing It Became, “Be Like Safeena.”
This played a transformative role in my life. I moved to the US and started my career in the non-protrofit sector. When I Came Back, I Started Educate Girls to Work for Other Girls Who Had Dropped Out and Hadn Bollywood Finished School. That was the inspiration.
In Nearly 20 years what are some of the changes you’ve seen?
When you’re doing the same thing year after year, you begin to see the movement only when you look back.
When I first started it was very difficult because not only was I trying to convince parents to send their DAUGHTERS to School, but school access
The right to education act came many years after we started. So parents would sometimes say, “Yes, I want send my Daughter to school. But where do I send her?” Now, there is a primary school within a kilometer and a secondary school within three kilometers. So access has really been resolved and we saw it has been almost overnight once rte was passed.
The second change, was very hard to have conversations about girls’ education. After the beti Bachao Beti Padhao Campaign, I didn’t have to convince anyone who girls’ education was important. Now, we could skip forward and ask, “What can we support you with?”
Then there are the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalays, The Residential Schools That The Government Runs and Have Been An Absolute Bowon for Tribal Girls and Theos with Migrant Parents. These stools have given girls in remote area an opportunity to be educated.
I have to mention one more big shift we’ve seen. There’s a huge gender gap in national institute for open schools with only 20-30% enrollment by girls. But in Rajasthan, Open Schools Were Made Free For Girls and Now You Have More Girls Than Boys.
Girls’ Education is one of India’s great successes, if you look at the data on enrollment and even on higher education. Despite the interruption caused by covid, the girls have progressed. To what do you attribute this success?
We have an algorithm that predicts the number of out-of-to-shop girls in Each Village. Between the ages of Six and 14, We found that 5% of Villages in India have 40% of out-of-up-shop girls. The point has actually shrunk to hot spots. Educate Girls Focuses on a Precision-Targeted Approach. It does not need to be done nationwide. These are villages that are very rural, remote, tribal where that last push really needs to be made.
Why are these 40% girls still out of school?
It’s a combination of poverty, patriarchy and systemic issues. Poverty puts pressure on Families to Get Girls Into The Workforce or Pull them out of School For Household Duties If Both Parents are working. Then you have patriarchy which actually de-priorities the girl child and makes them more marginalized, the first to be pulled out. And finally there are systemic issues for the older girls. For every 100 primary schools we have 40 middle schools and 24 secondary schools. So that distance with restrictions on Mobility are factors. There is pressure to marry.
One of the things we we’ve spoken about in the past is the natural program from education to workforce participation. In India, this link seems to be broken as even educated women drop out of paid work. Do you agree and, if so, why does this happy?
I want to get to the root cause for this because it impacts everything from Dowry to Workforce Participation. What is really going on underneath? In my experience, there are three pillars. The first is aspiration: the girls don’t aspiration and the parents do’t have aspiration for their Daughters. The second is confidence. The girl does not have confidence in her. And finally there is support, which is lacking.
So if you look at workforce participation, just gettingting to a job, people will say say, “What’s the need? The husband is earning.” So there is lacked of aspiration. The second is if you haven other people Around you working then Family support is really lacking. You have to do the housework, go to office and make sure everything is perfect.
So, I look at all gender programming through this lens of how can we shift aspiration, confidence and support bot for the girl child and her gate-keepers?
What are your plans for the next 10 years, 20 years for educate girls?
The bad news of winning an award like this is that we’re getting more amableous. In the last 18 years, we’ve brough about two million girls, we’ve mobileized them in partnership with communities to come back into education. But our Vision is 10×10: 10 Million Learners Over the Next 10 years. We’re dreaming really big. We are dreaming of cracking open the pathways for them and especially in the area that we work in rural and remote areas.
