Mind the Gap: In her words: Safeena Husain
Earlier this week, I spoke to Safeena Husain, the passionate and inspiring founder of non-profit Educate Girls
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’ve spoken intermittently and each 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 mobilized over two million girls in over 30,000 villages in Rajasthan as well as Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
Keeping a girl in school has the immediate result of delaying her marriage. It means she will have fewer and healthier children. Each additional year a girl stays in school has the potential to boost her income by as much as 20%. And if all girls completed 12 years of school, India’s GDP could rise by nearly 10% over the next decade.
Earlier this week on August 31, Educate Girls became the first Indian organisation to win the Ramon Magsaysay Award, also known as the Asian Nobel Prize, for “its commitment to addressing cultural stereotyping 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?
{{/usCountry}}Earlier this week on August 31, Educate Girls became the first Indian organisation to win the Ramon Magsaysay Award, also known as the Asian Nobel Prize, for “its commitment to addressing cultural stereotyping 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?
{{/usCountry}}I grew up in Delhi where part of my childhood passed under very difficult circumstances because of which I had an interruption in my own education for a few years. Everyone said, “Let’s get her married off. What else can she do?”
{{/usCountry}}I grew up in Delhi where part of my childhood passed under very difficult circumstances because of which I had an interruption in my own education for a few years. Everyone said, “Let’s get her married off. What else can she do?”
{{/usCountry}}I had no self-esteem. 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 changed 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-profit sector. When I came back, I started Educate Girls to work for other girls who had dropped out and hadn’t 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 itself was difficult.
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 happen almost overnight once RTE was passed.
The second change, was that earlier it was very hard to have conversations about girls’ education. After the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign, I didn’t have to convince anyone why 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 boon for tribal girls and those with migrant parents. These schools have given girls in remote areas 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% enrolment 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-school girls in each village. Between the ages of six and 14, we found that 5% of villages in India have 40% of out-of-school girls. The point has actually shrunk to hot spots. Educate Girls focuses on a precision-targeted approach. It doesn’t 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-prioritises 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’ve spoken about in the past is the natural progression 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 happen?
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 have aspiration and the parents don’t have aspiration for their daughters. The second is confidence. The girl doesn’t have confidence in herself. And finally there is support, which is lacking.
So if you look at workforce participation, just getting to a job, people will say, “What’s the need? The husband is earning.” So there is lack of aspiration. The second is if you haven’t seen other people around you working then your own confidence is a bit low and it becomes easy to give it up for household work. 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 both 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 ambitious. In the last 18 years, we’ve brought about two million girls, we’ve mobilized them in partnership with communities to come back into education. But our vision is 10x10: 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 areas that we work in rural and remote areas.
