Safeena Husain Wants to Lift Up India’s ‘Left-Behind’ Girls
Safeena Husain Wants to Lift Up India’s ‘Left-Behind’ Girls
Connor GreeneThu, February 26, 2026 at 12:35 PM UTC
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Safeena Husain Credit - Courtesy Educate Girls
It’s been a landmark year for Safeena Husain, the founder of Educate Girls, a Mumbai-based nonprofit that has helped more than 2 million girls in some of India’s most remote villages get back into the classroom. When Educate Girls was selected in 2019 as the first Asian organization to be supported by the Audacious Project, a social-impact funding group that operates under the aegis of TED, it set a goal of educating 1.5 million out-of-school girls; in 2025, it hit that number—and kept going. Husain also received a Rockefeller Foundation residency, during which she wrote a book about her effort. And then Educate Girls became the first nonprofit to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award, widely known as Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize.
Husain’s motivations are personal: She says she spent much of her childhood in poverty, surrounded by violence and abuse, which led to interruptions in her own education from a young age. After becoming the first in her family to study overseas and then working for a decade in the nonprofit sector in San Francisco, Husain returned to India and founded Educate Girls. “From day one till today, it is focused on the out-of-school girl, because that’s my lived experience,” Husain says. “That’s what I know, [what it] feels like to be left behind.”
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Husain’s new book, Every Last Girl: A Journey to Educate India’s Forgotten Daughters, which came out in January, is dedicated to a girl named Antimbala—meaning “the last girl,” so called because her parents, reflecting a prevailing bias, hoped she would be their final daughter.
By telling the story of people like Antimbala, Husain hopes to bridge the gender gap for education access in India—a country where, according to the Malala Fund’s Girls’ Education Report Card, 16% of all school-age girls are not enrolled. By 2035, Educate Girls wants to have increased its reach to 10 million students. But the work doesn’t stop there.
“I just want to remind people that there’s still 133 million girls globally that are out of school,” she says. “I’ve never met a girl who said, ‘I don’t want to go to school. I want to graze the goats. I want to be a child bride. I want to do the household work.’ No girl says that. Every single girl wants to be able to go to school.”
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Source: “AOL Breaking”
