Safeena Husain

Safeena Husain is a social entrepreneur whose work has centred on getting out-of-school girls in rural India into classrooms. Her own schooling was interrupted after secondary level by family circumstances, and while some relatives pressed for an early marriage an aunt backed her further education. She moved to the United Kingdom and in 1995 graduated in economic history from the London School of Economics, the first in her family to take a degree abroad. She then worked in international development on public health, community development and poverty alleviation across Asia, Africa and Latin America, including a spell as executive director of Child Family Health International between 1997 and 2004.

She returned to India in 2005 and founded Educate Girls in 2007. Her starting point was that India had no organisation working at scale specifically on the gender gap in education, so she began in Pali and Jalore in Rajasthan, the districts with the widest gaps, working with the education department rather than around it, and drawing on the practice of Pratham and UNICEF. The central method was community mobilisation: a volunteer network called Team Balika that identifies girls who are not in school and persuades families to enrol them. Team Balika has since grown past 55,000 community volunteers, and the organisation signed a memorandum with the state government to replicate its model in 2,083 schools in Jalore. Educate Girls reports having supported the enrolment and retention of more than two million girls and improved learning outcomes for more than 2.5 million children.

Husain also pushed the organisation into new financing territory. Between 2015 and 2018 Educate Girls ran the world's first development impact bond in education, an outcomes-based instrument under which payment depended on results; an independent evaluation found the programme exceeded all its enrolment and learning targets, and it is now a standard reference point for results-based financing in education. Educate Girls was also the first organisation in Asia selected for TED's Audacious Project.

She was made a Rainer Arnhold Fellow of the Mulago Foundation in 2013 and named a Times Now Amazing Indian in 2014. Educate Girls won the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2015, and she received the WISE Prize for Education from the Qatar Foundation in 2023, the first Indian woman to do so, carrying 500,000 US dollars for the organisation. She was given an honorary doctorate by the London School of Economics in 2024, and in 2025 Educate Girls became the first Indian non-profit organisation to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award. She published Every Last Girl: A Journey to Educate India's Forgotten Daughters at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January 2026, and was named to the TIME Women of the Year list in 2026.[2]