We have to keep ‘knocking on every single door’...

So many things have changed. When we first started in Pali, Rajasthan and we’d go and talk to parents, they’d say, “We’re happy to send our child to school, but where are the schools?” The schools were far away, you see.

Access itself was a challenge. We ran bridge courses and camps. The Right to Education Act gave us a big tailwind — every village now had a school nearby and we could even request new ones from the district administration.

The Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao campaign also helped. Earlier, we spent a lot of energy convincing people that educating girls mattered. With the national slogan everywhere, that conversation became easier.

A third big change was residential schools — the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas — where everything is free. Migrant parents have so many concerns, leaving their girl child alone. These really helped.

So, infrastructure, advocacy and campaigning came together to change the ground realities

At Educate Girls, we don’t own anything. You don’t control the community. You have to change mindsets through dialogue and gently influencing and taking people along. You don’t control the schools, either. So, you better learn to work in partnership with the school administration, the management committees, the teachers, because nothing compels them to work with you.

We are mobilisers at heart — that’s what this organisation really is. Our heart beats for the girl child, and we mobilise whoever we have to. The only way to do that is to find common ground — and that’s what we do.

At the government level, I think finding common ground is easier because they have also signed on for Sustainable Development Goals. That’s exactly what we are working for. So you can actually have an authentic collaboration.

We go door to door. That in itself is labour, right? Sometimes those doors can be at the top of a mountain, sometimes across a river. Our Team Balikas and frontline staff are out there, knocking on every single door.

We’re constantly panicking, did we miss someone? Was there a girl behind that mountain whom we didn’t see, a house that we missed? That constant mental and physical labour requires enormous effort. And you don’t go just once, you have to go again and again. Today, there’s nobody in the house; tomorrow, they want to consult the mother-in-law. It’s relentless…

Your question is really beautiful. It makes me pause. How do you keep your hopes up: aaj darwaza nahi khula, kal khulega (today, they didn’t talk to us, maybe tomorrow they will)? No matter how many doors are shut in your face, to keep going back, again and again. I think keeping that optimism alive and converting it into action on a daily basis is the invisible labour.

We tend to see the world in black and white — there’s the urban-rural divide; this is okay, that is not... all kinds of perceptions. One of the things that helps me navigate extreme positions is this absolute belief that patriarchy stains us all.

Somewhere it’s a light pink, somewhere it’s a deep red — it’s only the shade that’s different. Even in our own urban homes, when the doorbell rings, who usually gets up to open the door? There’s patriarchy, in the smallest thing like that.

An urban working woman steps out to make a million-dollar pitch and as soon as she’s back home, she’s asking: “Fridge mein dahi thha kya bacchon ke lunch ke liye? (Was there curd in the fridge for the children’s lunch?)” Whether you’re in an urban or a rural environment, the patriarchal norms are the same. The struggle is the same. I navigated by keeping that gender lens on; by realising you have to learn and unlearn in every surrounding.

We are insiders because our work is community-driven—through the tens of thousands of Team Balika volunteers we have on the ground. It’s not like you and I went and randomly knocked on someone’s door and lectured them about sending their daughters to school. The slogan the Team carries is this: ‘Mera gaon, meri samasya, main hi samadhan (my village, my problem, and I am the solution)’.

In that sense, the entire model is ‘insider’ — 95 per cent of the people who work in Educate Girls come from the same villages, blocks, districts, states. They come from the same lived experiences. Everything is run and led by and through community ownership and community voices.

The outsider lens helped me lay the foundation. For example, I worked in the Amazon jungle with the Shuar tribe. It was a huge learning. When I came to India and started this work, I carried that experience of walking for two days just to get from one cluster of homes to another.

So, working in remote, rural and tribal areas wasn’t new for me. I was actually very comfortable, more than in urban settings. Building, designing and scaling — those are what I do in the city.

That’s a very good question. In gender programming, sometimes we only see what is obvious. Physicians don’t do that. They won’t jump to the cure for the disease based on surface symptoms. If you have a fever, is it malaria or something else? They’ll do a blood test and then proceed.

I think the biggest challenge is threefold, and that’s where treatment is needed.

First: aspiration. Girls lack aspiration because we never help them build it. Their parents and gatekeepers don’t have any aspirations for them either. “Yeh kya karegi? Collector thodi na banna hai? Roti hi toh banani hai! (What will she do? She’s hardly going to become a collector! She just needs to know how to make rotis!).” That kind of thing.

Second: confidence. Without aspiration, you don’t have confidence. Sometimes, the girl has it, but the parents don’t.

Third: support. We need to make sure that girls get the support they need. Sometimes the girl has both aspiration and confidence, but the family is not supportive and she can’t go ahead.

So, that’s the treatment, not just for the girl but also for her gatekeepers, her family, and all of us as a community. We don’t talk about this enough.

I’ve had girls coming back after 8–10 years of sitting at home, thinking that’s all life has to offer. And then it strikes them: “I can apply for a job, I can apply for a bank loan!” (You need a Class10 certificate to get one.) Things that were blocked open up.

I asked one of the girls: tell me one thing that changed for you. She told me about the time her brother wanted to buy a house. When asked who would look at the contract — as he works faraway in Pune — he replied, “Woh hai na ghar pe? (She’s at home, she will!)” That confidence, that respect came because she’s educated.

People said, you can’t do it in India. You guys are data poor. Even if it’s evaluated, who will believe your results? It took me three years to even be able to pilot a ‘payment by results’ transaction.

It was run in a rural area in Rajasthan. It had a gold standard evaluation that showed over 92 per cent of the girls were brought back into school and stayed on. Learning outcomes were equal to an additional year of schooling. That blew them away!

We made the transaction open source so that everybody could follow it. And now there are 220+ bonds in the world that are following in our footsteps, deploying almost a billion dollars-worth of social impact capital.

And while anecdotes are great, you need hard numbers. So now we measure enrollment, retention, learning outcomes for all of our children. And that is what we hold ourselves accountable to.

Just to put things in perspective, in the last 18 years, we have been able to mobilise over 2 million girls to come back to the classrooms where they belong. We’ve also improved learning outcomes for 2.4 million children.

Over the next 10 years, we want to be able to reach 10 million learners. It’s a 10x10 strategy. We don’t just want scale, we also want depth and quality. I'll give you an example. This year, the topper in the state open school exams in Rajasthan is a Pragati girl, which is our second chance programme. The topper in Madhya Pradesh is also a Pragati girl. So, we want the 10 million, and we also want all the toppers! We’re setting ourselves some very, very ambitious goals.