Urvashi Sahni

Founder

Founder of Prerna Girls School (Study Hall Educational Foundation)

Urvashi Sahni is the founder of Prerna Girls School (Study Hall Educational Foundation)[1], an Indian non-profit working on education and women & children from Lucknow.

Urvashi Sahni is an Indian educator, social entrepreneur and women's rights activist. She is the founder and chief executive of the Study Hall Educational Foundation in Lucknow, which runs a group of schools and teacher-training programmes, and the founder of Prerna Girls School, a low-cost school for girls from disadvantaged households.

Her approach, which she describes as critical feminist pedagogy, treats schooling as a means of making girls aware of gendered power structures and of building their capacity to question social norms.

Early life and education

Sahni holds a master's degree and a doctorate in education from the University of California, Berkeley.

Career

Sahni founded Suraksha, a women's rights organisation, in 1983. In 1986 she started Study Hall school in Lucknow, and the Study Hall Educational Foundation was subsequently established as a society. In 2003 she founded Prerna Girls School under the foundation's umbrella, to serve girls from economically disadvantaged families in Lucknow; the school has taught more than 5,000 girls and was featured in a documentary associated with the Obama Foundation's Girls Opportunity Alliance. In 2008 she started DiDi's, a social enterprise.

The foundation reports that its work has reached more than 100,000 teachers. Sahni has been a non-resident fellow at the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution since 2013, and her book Reaching for the Sky: Empowering Girls through Education was published by Brookings Institution Press in 2017.

Recognition

Sahni was named one of the BBC's 100 Women in 2017 for her work on the education and empowerment of girls. She became an Ashoka Fellow in 2010, received the HAAS International Award in 2001, and was named Social Entrepreneur of the Year in India in 2017. In 2024 she was an Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow at Harvard University.[2][3][4][5]

Prerna Girls School (Study Hall Educational Foundation)

Prerna Girls School is a pioneering initiative of the Study Hall Educational Foundation (SHEF), founded by educator Urvashi Sahni to provide affordable, quality schooling to girls from Lucknow's low-income and historically marginalised communities. The school shares its campus with the fee-paying Study Hall School and applies 'Critical Feminist Pedagogy' to build students' self-esteem and capacity to question gendered social norms. It began with 30 girls in 2003 and has since educated thousands of students from surrounding slums, many of whom would otherwise have worked as domestic help. The school has been featured in an Emmy-winning documentary tied to the Obama Foundation's Girls Opportunity Alliance.

Prerna Girls School (Study Hall Educational Foundation) reports the following, on its own site: