Farida Lambay

Farida Lambay is a social work academic who co-founded Pratham, one of India's largest education non-profits. Trained at the College of Social Work, Nirmala Niketan in Mumbai, where she took her master's degree and later taught, rising to vice-principal, she brought the discipline of professional social work into an organisation that would become known for measurement and scale.

Pratham began as an idea developed in UNICEF's Bombay office: that government, business and citizens acting together could fix schooling on a large scale. At a meeting convened in late 1993 by Mumbai's municipal commissioner, a charitable trust was agreed on; Madhav Chavan was appointed executive secretary and Lambay was to support him, and the two came to be regarded as Pratham's co-founders. The Pratham Mumbai Education Initiative Trust was registered on 11 January 1995, though the work had already started with ten young staff, half of them her own students from Nirmala Niketan. The early programmes were a community preschool network built on a mix of volunteering and enterprise, and from 1996 the Balsakhi remedial classes in municipal schools that grew into Pratham's Teaching at the Right Level method.

Within Pratham, Lambay has been responsible for direct programmes in Mumbai and Gujarat and for the Pratham Council for Vulnerable Children, which works nationally on the rescue, rehabilitation and prevention of child labour and grew out of the bridge courses Pratham ran for out-of-school children. She has carried the same concerns into public policy, sitting on government committees on child labour eradication and on education, and on the Maharashtra state commission for the protection of child rights. She now also leads Pratham's people, capacity-building and staff welfare functions and chairs its apex committee on the prevention of sexual harassment. Honours listed by Pratham include the Maharashtra government's Devi Ahilyabai Holkar award, a Hindustan Times Changemaker award and a FICCI FLO Trailblazer award in 2023.[2][3]