A Quick Insight On Education, Development And Gender Issues

Educate Girls’ Founder and Board Member Safeena Husain has unremittingly worked for the past 15 years towards achieving an integrated solution that can bring girls back to school. In this series of short essays, she shares the challenges and experiences through a gender lens augmented with her lived experience as a social entrepreneur building a sustainable ecosystem to ensure that girls are in school, learning well, and completing their education.

Education plays an inimitable role in strengthening the socio-economic bedrock of a nation, and 9 out of 17 Sustainable Development Goals are directly addressed by educating girls. Although girls’ education has a multiplier effect in nation-building, it is often inhibited by the failure of translating policies on-ground due to both geographical and socioeconomic challenges.

Between children and education in India, there is an overarching hurdle marking millions of children out of school. If we break down the hurdle in smaller, solvable elements, three Ps come to the fore: Poverty, Policy, and Patriarchy. Recently, a new P had to be added to the array – the Pandemic.

Living through possibly one of the worst crises of the twenty-first century, the Covid 19 Pandemic, Safeena offers her perceptive observation on issues unique to the pandemic that surfaced during the school lockdown adding much distress to the already existing factors.

Take this journey with us towards delving into insights about all things girls, education, and development from Safeena Husain with her sea of experience from starting and scaling a non-profit to serve over 1.2 million girls for enrolment to date across the remotest villages in India.

You can read the essays here.