These three Ps are a bottleneck to Indian girls getting an education: Safeena Husain

Safeena Husain knows a thing or two about the value of education and what it means to persevere. The founder of Educate Girls, which earlier this week was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award, overcame poverty and violence to complete her studies. Husain speaks with Shruti Sonal about bringing nearly two million girls across India back to schools, AI’s potential in the development sector, and what comes next. Edited excerpts:How did your personal experiences lead you to start Educate Girls nearly two decades ago?I grew up in Delhi under difficult circumstances. A part of my childhood was spent in a lot of poverty and there was violence, abuse, and lots of turbulence, because of which my education was incomplete. I felt like a failure and my self-esteem went for a toss. But I was lucky because a family friend stepped into my life and gave me love and affection. She inspired and motivated me to get back to education. It was because of the support she provided that I ended up going to the London School of Economics at 21. Even before going for any class, I saw myself differently, the world saw me differently, and it was deeply transformative. After that, I moved to the US and learned how to run an NGO and build programs in remote areas. By the time I came back to India in 2005, I was asking myself: what is the next step for me? I knew I had to work in the domain of girls’ education, as my personal journey had brought me to that point.What’s the biggest hurdle to girls’ education?I’d say it’s the three Ps: poverty, patriarchy, and policy. Poverty puts pressure on girls to run the household so that their parents can go and work on the farm or do daily wage labour. Patriarchy deprioritises girls and marginalises them even further in decision-making. The third is policy. Today, in terms of elementary education, we have the Right to Education (RTE) Act. However, for older girls, because secondary schools tend to be further away and distance learning opportunities are still not completely available, systemic factors become a huge bottleneck.Working across the country, how do you convince parents to educate girls?Our job used to be much harder before the RTE Act. When we used to have conversations with parents, they’d say, “But where is the school?” Now, at least there’s a primary school within a kilometre, and a middle school within three. The Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign has helped too, as villagers have heard of the slogan and think it must be important. There’s been some progress, but in areas that are rural, remote and tribal, there are still red patches when it comes to girls’ education. We do mindset change through a people-powered model, which relies on our 23,000 Team Balika volunteers, many of them young men, and our field staff who are from the same villages. I firmly believe that you and I going to a villager’s house and lecturing them about girls’ education and pointing fingers is not going to work. That messaging has to come from a local person whom people listen to. And it has to be a local message. We can only give a voice to members of the community.Yours was the first NGO to use AI for its projects...We built an algorithm that can predict the number of out-of-school girls per village. It uses our door-to-door survey data combined with publicly available data. Usually, what we find is that out-of-school girls are clustered in certain hotspots. In a district that has 1,000 villages, you might find that 80% of out-of-school girls are actually in 20-30% of the villages. We can now predict which pockets they will be in, and validate that with our on-ground search surveys and information. A precision targeting approach helps trim the timeline of implementation by nearly 40-45%.What plans for the future?Winning an award like this makes you more ambitious. In the last 18 years, we have worked with communities to mobilise over two million girls to come back into the classrooms where they belong. In the next 10 years, we’re setting our vision even bigger, of having 10 million learners. We also want to work more with adolescent girls, who either dropped out or failed classes, and are not eligible to go back into formal schooling.Tell us about the memoir you have coming out soon.It is more about the journey of Educate Girls, mixed in with my personal experience as much as it relates to this journey and this mission.You’re the daughter of noted actor Yusuf Hussain and are married to director Hansal Mehta. Can cinema help change gendered attitudes?Cinema can definitely help in bringing about a norm shift. But in terms of my husband’s work and mine, it’s a separation of church and state. He doesn’t tell me how to do education. And I prefer not to give him any kind of feedback about cinema, which I believe is the key to a happy marriage. In our work, we use storytelling, but it consists of stories from the community itself, not from outside.How has the work shaped you as a person?Patriarchy stains us all. Some of us may be a lighter shade of pink, while others may be deep red, but it stains us all. None of us is immune to patriarchy, and therefore, all of us have a role to play in constantly being aware of that, unlearning those behaviours, and then relearning new ones.