NGO chief wins prestigious award for helping girls go to school

Safeena Husain, the founder of the Indian charity Educate Girls — which works to get girls who are out of school into the classroom — has been awarded the WISE Prize for Education. The $500,000 award was announced Monday during the two-day World Innovation Summit for Education, or WISE, Summit in Doha, Qatar, which brought together more than 2,000 educators. The gathering marks the 11th WISE Summit, which takes place every two years and was founded by the Qatar Foundation. This year’s theme — “Creative Fluency: Human Flourishing in the Age of AI” — saw discussions around how artificial intelligence can be used to transform education systems and outcomes. “Girls' education is the closest thing we have to a silver bullet to solve some of the world’s most complex problems,” Husain said at the event. “We must recognize that the right to education is a girl’s inherent right — a right that must always take center stage.” Why it matters: Husain founded Educate Girls in 2007 to tackle high numbers of school-aged girls not enrolled in education — in 2019, an estimated 28 million girls aged 5 to 17 were not in school. Evidence shows that educating girls has myriad knock-on beneficial effects for girls and their families, including higher vaccination rates, reductions in child marriage, and higher incomes. Educated women also are more than twice as likely to send their own children to school. How it works: The model involves first identifying villages with high levels of out-of-school children and then recruiting and training volunteers within those communities to act as champions. They go door to door to find girls who are not in school and then work to convince parents to enroll them through home visits and village meetings. Educate Girls then provides remedial teaching to help girls catch up and transition back into school. What’s different: In a country with 700,000 villages, Educate Girls is using artificial intelligence to predict where the highest concentration of out-of-school girls is likely to live. Through AI, the NGO discovered that 40% of them were concentrated in just 5% of the villages, vastly narrowing down the focus of Educate Girls’ efforts and accelerating its progress. “AI can help us find the most vulnerable girls faster,” Husain said. What’s the impact: Over the last 15 years, Educate Girls has enrolled more than 1.4 million children in 21,000 villages across four states in northern India, boasting a 93% retention rate. The NGO also took part in the world’s first development impact bond in education, and exceeded learning performance targets. What’s next: Husain has big plans for the future. Remaining focused on India, the target is to get 10 million girls back into school over the next 10 years, Husain said during a press conference after the award ceremony.