What it takes to keep India’s daughters in school—and the volunteers leading the fight

The roots of this mission go back to Husain’s own life. She once dropped out of school herself, her confidence eroded until her aunt intervened. 

“When everybody else had given up on me, and I had given up on myself, my aunt—like an angel—stepped into my life,” she said. “She gave me a lot of love, motivated me to get back into education and as a direct result of that, I got admission at the London School of Economics, becoming the first person in my family to go overseas for university.” 

That personal rescue became the blueprint. “Today, we have thousands of Team Balika volunteers who are playing the role my aunt played in my life, but across tens of thousands of villages and millions of girls.”

Her path was unlikely. In the mid-1990s, Husain worked in Silicon Valley at an internet start-up attempting to build a 3D web browser. “Obviously, even today we don’t have a 3D web browser,” she said with a laugh. Disillusioned, she pivoted to non-profit work, spending years in community health projects in Ecuador, Mexico, Bolivia, South Africa and India. Those years became a training ground in how to operate in rural, remote and tribal settings. “All of this helped me learn how to work in rural, remote and tribal areas—skills that have been critical for Educate Girls.”

The challenges were never small. Husain described them as the two P’s: poverty and patriarchy. Poverty forced families to keep girls at home for work, chores or sibling care. Patriarchy deprioritised their futures altogether. To counter the first, Educate Girls connects families to social protection schemes; to chip away at the second, it relies on relentless persuasion. 

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Husain herself taught lessons in a tribal woman’s home. “Every morning, I would have to knock on the doors of the adolescent girl and negotiate with her mother. Every day she’d say, ‘Today she can’t come because we have prayers, or she has to fetch water.’ And every day I had to negotiate. That is why you need hyper-local teams who are mission-aligned. For them, their hearts beat for girls’ education.”

It is a slow, generational project. Husain explained: “We actually stay in a village around six to eight years. If you stay that long, you work with 10 cohorts, which is a generation. You’re taking a generational approach to social change.”

Related: Get to know the 3 recipients of the 2025 Ramon Magsaysay Award who are shaping a better society

As the organisation grew—expanding from a few hundred villages to more than 5,000—Husain worried whether scale meant replication or genuine results. That question led to a global first: the Development Impact Bond in education. Instead of conventional funding, Educate Girls was financed based on measurable outcomes in enrolment and learning, independently verified. If they failed, funds would not flow. 

“I was intrigued by pay-for-performance contracts,” Husain said. “If we could pilot it, maybe we could build delivery of results into our DNA.” They surpassed every target. The model has since been adopted more than 200 times worldwide by NGOs and other people in the sector, but its origins trace back to a grassroots team in India.

At the leadership table sits Ujwal Thakar, chairman of Educate Girls, who points out that men must also take responsibility in shifting attitudes. In a society where fathers and brothers often decide the fate of daughters, male allies matter. The movement has always been built on coalitions—government partners, donors, local volunteers, women and men alike. 

“Change and mindset change really needs to come from within the community,” Husain reiterates. “You cannot lecture somebody. You cannot be an outsider coming in and trying to push for it.”

In August 2025, the Ramon Magsaysay Foundation announced Educate Girls as one of its laureates. The citation praised 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.” For Husain, the award was a moment to look back as much as forward. 

“When the announcement was made, I was in tears, because the entire 18-year journey completely flashed before my eyes,” she said. “It’s been the hard work of tens of thousands of volunteers on the ground, our government partnerships, our supporters, our team members—everyone who has worked for one mission and one mission alone, and that is to find girls who are not in school, bring them back, make sure they are staying and learning and able to achieve their dreams.”

Her hope now is that the recognition becomes a tailwind for the future. India still has millions of girls out of school, each one a deferred life. The obstacles remain, but the model (persistent, generational) has shown results. Husain remembers that her own life turned because one woman refused to give up on her. Educate Girls has turned that act of faith into a movement, multiplied across tens of thousands of villages.

“We are very grateful for the recognition,” she said. “But most of all, thank you for shining a light on girls’ education, and on the courage and grit of our girls who, after interruptions of years, sometimes come back to complete their education and fulfil their dreams.”

The courage lies in those choices: a girl who decides to return after years away, a mother who says yes after months of persuasion, a volunteer who knocks on the same door every morning until it finally opens. Educate Girls has built a movement out of such choices, one that has turned quiet acts of persistence into the collective push for generational change.

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