2014-2024
GETTING INDIAN GIRLS INTO CLASSROOMS
© Cartier Philanthropy / Cyril le Tourneur
2014-2024
EDUCATE GIRLS
Educate Girls tackles the gender and literacy gap in rural India’s education system to bring out-of-school girls back to mainstream education. From an initial pilot project of 50 schools in 2007, it currently operates in over 20,000 villages in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. We’ve been funding its unique approach since 2014, helping enroll over 54,300 girls, which it aims to scale to 1.5 million girls by 2024.
CHALLENGE
© Cartier Philanthropy / Cyril le Tourneur
ACTION
Educate Girls mobilises and supervises a huge number of community volunteers, called Team Balika, who go door to door across thousands of villages to identify girls that are not in school and convince families to enroll them.
Household visits and community outreach are at the heart of the organisation’s success. Its analytics enable the targeting of villages with a higher concentration of out-of-school girls.
The organisation also taps into government resources to improve schools’ infrastructure, governance and teaching. It offers an interactive remedial education programme to help girls (and boys) build their competences in Hindi, English and Maths.
In every upper primary school, Educate Girls facilitates the election of a Girls’ Council to give girls a voice, boost their confidence and build life skills, such as communication, leadership and problem-solving.
OUT-OF-SCHOOL GIRLS ENROLLED
since Educate Girls’ inception
RETENTION RATE
(Data from May 2023)
COMMUNITY VOLUNTEERS
make up Educate Girls’ team
COVID-19 EMERGENCY SUPPORT
© Educate Girls
3 Aug 2022
Lessons learned over a decade of grant-making
Philanthropy is all about collective action towards shared goals. This is why we want to share what we have learned during the last ten years, successes and bumps included.
30 May 2022
Empowering women through education
Here's a brief overview of how we, with our partners, are making a difference for girls and women across the globe, from pre-school to university.
6 Jul 2021
Our COVID-19 emergency support for India
To respond to the devastating wave of COVID-19 outbreak that is ravaging India, we are stepping up our support to the emergency response of two long-standing partners, Médecins Sans Frontières and Educate Girls.
18 Jan 2021
The predictive power of machine learning
Machine learning uses data, usually in large quantities, and statistical algorithms to predict something that isn’t known. The first article of our Driven By Data series explores how machine-learning models inform Educate Girls’ expansion strategy.
11 Jan 2021
Why we need data science
Our new series #Driven by Data will explore how data analytics is helping fix some of the world’s most pressing issues, improving the way development actors identify problems and design tailor-made interventions to address them.
26 Jun 2020
Education endures
The COVID-19 shutdowns have resulted in millions of children being out of school. School closures are likely to prove more than an interruption in the schooling of many girls and boys, putting an end to their education forever.
9 Mar 2020
Safeena Husain’s vision of equality
On the occasion of International Women’s day 2020, we asked Safeena Husain, founder and CEO of our partner organisation Educate Girls, to share her vision of gender equality and women’s empowerment. Read her exclusive interview.
