Questions/Answers

Established by Safeena Husain in 2007, Educate Girls is a non-profit focusing on enrolment, retention, improved learning outcomes and life-skills of the most marginalized children in primary schools. Educate Girls aim is to empower 1.5 Million girls in India to access public school by 2024. The country has a large gender disparity in the education sector with more than 60% of Out-Of-School Children (OOSC) being girls. In India rural areas, only 40% of the girls’ complete class five and 1% reaches class 12. For these girls, the problem of education involves poverty, patriarchy, social-cultural practices, gender related issues such as child marriage (as early as age 10), hygiene issues, and safety. Girls often must stay home to help their parents in taking care of younger children or spend hours a day on household chores. Educate Girls thus initiated a project, “Educate a Child Initiative”, to mobilize and leverage public, private, and community resources to improve access to quality education and school infrastructure. The project was co-funded (since 2012) by the Educate A Child program of the Education Above All Foundation based in Qatar. The project’s initial objective was to support Educate Girls’ expansion plan in Rajasthan State of India (2012-2019), and enrolled 112,660 OOSC. A second (2016 -2021) and third project (2018-2024) are ongoing and expanding the enrolment targets in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh States by 199,000 and 232,500 OOSC, respectively. Educate Girls is operating in the states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh that have the lowest access indicators and highest gender disparities in India. The outcomes are achieved via village-based change makers called “Team Balika” and a hyper-local Educate Girls field team using door-to-door surveys, community mobilization, and cutting edge machine learning and advanced analytics for identification of Out of School children.

Every day in India, 4.1 million girls of school age do not show up to the classrooms in which they belong. These are classrooms that could, if entered, have dramatically positive effects upon the girls’ health, their wealth, and the livelihood of their families and communities. Yet these girls do not show up because of myriad reasons that relate to one thing: their gender. Educate Girls started working closely with the Rajasthan State government under a Public-Private-Partnership framework – the Rajasthan Education Initiative (REI). They are also aligned with the National Education Policy Right to Education (RTE) Act.

Educate Girls work mainly supports SDG-4, and the projects specifically address two targets in SDG-4: Target 4.1 on Access: Educate Girls seeks to ensure that all children have access to free, equitable and quality primary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes by leveraging community based volunteers known as the Team Balika. They undertake identification of OOSC and help enroll them in government schools. They also ensure retention through implementation of life-skills education for adolescent girls and working with the School Management Committees to improve school infrastructure and governance. Target 4.5 on Gender: Educate Girls was established with an aim to provide education opportunities to the most marginalized girls in India and to narrow the gender gap in the program geographies in order to provide equal access to all. The projects combat harmful cultural practices such as child marriage and child labor. By July 2020, the Educate Girls projects had supported the enrolment into public schools of a total of 287,541 OOSC of whom 179,290 (62%) were girls. Overall enhancing girl’s education is linked to SDG’s like No poverty, Good Health, Quality Education, Gender Equality, Good jobs & Economic Growth, Reduced Inequalities, Climate Action

The Educate Girls model utilizes a bottom up approach and ensures community ownership by raising awareness on the importance of education. The program model complements the existing government set-up to usher in a holistic systemic reform in the most rural and remote geographies. and delivers measurable results thousands of beneficiaries at an extremely low cost and avoids duplication or parallel delivery of services. Educate Girls’ team shares the OOSC data with the respective district government officials. Educate Girls has secured multi-year funding commitments from a variety of funders both in India and abroad, thus ensuring financial sustainability.

Initially, the Educate Girls’ team targeted OOSC based on the administrative data obtained from the education office in Rajasthan State. However, the team realized that there were always many more OOSC in the villages and the available data was outdated. They then initiated their own data collection mechanism with extensive door-to-door visits in each of the program villages. This led to the identification of many more OOSC who would otherwise not have been known. Educate Girls has gone a step further and applied cutting edge machine learning and advanced analytics for identification of Out of School children. During the house visits, the reasons cited for not enrolling children included lack of mandatory national registration documents such as the Aadhar card (National ID). The volunteers then supported the parents to apply for their child’s birth certificate and/or their own identification documents which are mandatory for enrollment in public schools. By so doing, many children enrolled and no one was left behind. Educate Girls also works to improve its outreach and advocacy with the federal and state governments for championing girls’ education by participating in policy level dialogues and improving on their working relationships.

According to UNICEF two in five girls in India drop out of school before they complete primary education. Educate Girls seeks to reverse this gender disparity by ensuring that more girls enroll and remain in school and have access to quality education. They do so through their predominantly female volunteer workforce, Team Balika, who undertake community mobilization campaigns and encourage parents to send girls to school. They also work closely with the School Management Committees (SMC) to assist in improving school governance and infrastructure so that the girls continue to stay in school.

The Educate Girls projects targets the enrolment of OOSC (age group 7-14 yrs) and has so far supported the enrolment of 287,541 OOSC (62% being girls) in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh states of India. Of those children enrolled, most attend school regularly and the retention rate is 82%. The project also supports improvement in numeracy and literacy skills among children through the implementation of Gyan ka Pitara (GKP) learning curriculum which translates to ‘Repository of Knowledge’. GKP is a remedial curriculum developed by Educate Girls which helps to improve learning outcomes in Hindi, English & Mathematics for students studying in classes 3, 4 and 5. To gauge the learning levels of the children, a baseline and end-line assessment is conducted in the schools. There was significant improvement in the average Hindi scores (9%,) a slight one in Mathematics (3%) and no improvement in English scores. The project also facilitates improvement in girls’ leadership and communication skills through the formation of Girls’ Councils known as ‘Bal Sabha’, where 235,456 girls in target schools have been trained in life-skills. The outcome is improved school governance and infrastructure and Educate Girls facilitated training and regular workings of 36,535 School Management Committees (SMCs).

Educate Girls goal was to scale up their initial work of improving enrolment, retention and learning for out-of-school girls in India. They got an opportunity to expand when Educate A Child agreed to partner with and co-fund 50% of the total project cost of $ 8.49 Million to enroll 105,196 OOSC. Educate Girls already had a cost-effective method of reaching the rural areas by engaging youth volunteers from the target communities to mobilize the communities to enroll the OOSC. These volunteers referred to as ‘Team Balika’ along with the field staff undertook all the program activities on the ground. These activities include: community mobilization meetings to sensitize them on the importance of education and bring about a systemic change to deem unacceptable the norms that keep children away from school (child marriage, gender bias in education, and low parental involvement in school matters), conducting door-to-door surveys to identify OOSC and help their enrollment in schools by conducting household visits to counsel parents, ensure retention by imparting life skills training to adolescent girls studying in grades 6-8 by formalizing Bal Sabha. Educate Girls’ Team Balika and staff also facilitate the regular working and train the School Management Committee’s on their roles and responsibilities and then assist them in preparation of School Improvement Plans. Educate Girls’ rigorous monitoring system is designed to provide regular feedback to allow changes in service delivery and implementation strategy to achieve the best possible results for out of school children. District Impact teams conduct qualitative and quantitative monitoring of program activities including validating field data on a monthly basis and conducting home/school visits to interact with village PRI/leaders, parents, SMC members, and other community stakeholders. They use a mobile phone application app for data collection and tracking of indicators on enrolment, retention, learning, school infrastructure and facilities.

Educate Girls works in the remotest of the villages with limited access to public transport, roads and other means of network connectivity which pose a challenge for the team. A change of a key contact person in a government office often leads to delays in project expansion since the incoming officer has to be briefed and updated on the ongoing work. The annual migration for agriculture or wage-earning purposes which is common in target areas disrupts children schooling. High attrition of the trained Team Balikas was disruptive to the project and Educate Girls had to improve on their recruitment criteria.

Educate Girls targets areas with poor gender indicators and engages stakeholders in those geographies to increase enrollment of girls in schools, improve retention and learning outcomes and mobilizes government resources to support it. Educate Girls leverages community volunteers (Team Balika) who act as innovative ‘champions of girls’ education in their village and support in program activities on the ground. Educate Girls has developed a robust Performance Management System to collect, aggregate, monitor, display and report performance of program activities carried out in the field and enables the team to draw insights from data to enable decision making.

Educate Girls launched the world’s first Development Impact Bonds (DIB) in education as a source of project funding, in partnership with UBS Optimus Foundation (UBSOF) and the Children's Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF). This was a payment-by-results model, where CIFF (as an outcome payer) promised to pay back the investor, UBSOF, the original investment amount plus extra returns as long as the agreed targets were delivered by Educate Girls (service provider). The Educate Girls’ DIB targeted increased enrolment of marginalized girls and children's progress in literacy and numeracy outcomes. Educate Girls exceeded both targets on learning levels (160%) and enrollment (116%).

Educate Girls has a mobile application, Survey CTO, used by its staff for data collection and tracking of 20+ impact indicators at a village and school level. This data is synchronized with PMS (Performance Management System), for data management and analysis. This has resulted in great reduction of time in compilation of data, elimination of human error and has enabled speedy decision making based on real time data. The application also tracks the movement of the field personnel and does geo-tagging of villages and time via GPS.

Educate Girls has designed a replicable, scalable, codified and high impact program model to achieve the outcomes of Enrollment – Retention - Learning. Scaling from a 500-school pilot in 2007, Educate Girls’ program has expanded to 30,000+ schools across 22 marginalized districts in India spread across three states in India namely Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh & Uttar Pradesh. Educate Girls aims to leverage its proven and codified model with high replicability by partnering with like-minded, responsible, experienced and competent grassroots NGOs to deliver its core program in several districts of Madhya Pradesh. They also became a technical partner of the district administration of Chittorgarh in Rajasthan and then trained the government personnel, shared best practices and provided technical inputs like School Assessment Charts (SACs), Learning kits, among others. Using this program model, Educate Girls plans to reach more OOSC across the country in future.

The transferability is well demonstrated as the program model has worked across Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh states of India, which cumulatively, represent a third of India’s population. While the context remains consistent (a mix of patriarchy and poverty proving to be the biggest barriers to girls’ education), each state demonstrates a unique blend of geographic and demographic (caste, community, language, dialect, socio-economic) disparities.

In partnership with the Educate A Child (EAC) programme of Education Above All Foundation, the Educate Girls program has seen a rapid increase in the available resources over the years. The first two projects (2012-2021) have so far enrolled 282,406 OOSC for a total budget of $33,381,119. This has been achieved through partnership with the public schools in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh states. Educate Girls has 1,758 staff members who are supported in the field by over 13,000 Team Balika volunteers

The project leverages the existing structures and investments at the community level such as the Gram Siksha Sabha (GSS), which is the village education committee and Mohalla (neighborhood) meetings (MM) that are organized to make the community aware of the children’s rights and distribute responsibilities. The School Management Committees, once in place, will continue to work for improved school infrastructure. Educate Girls operates for a minimum of 8 years in any new selected geography. To ensure financial sustainability, Educate Girls has earned the trust of and has secured multi-year commitments from a multitude of funders in India and overseas.

Si

Educate Girls undertakes an annual evaluation of their Gyan Ka Pitara (GKP) pedagogy, a micro-competency-based learning curriculum. This has a focus on students learning outcomes in Mathematics, English, and Hindi, using an ASER tool for assessment. Educate Girls also had the first Development Impact Bond (DIB) in education assessed by independent evaluator, IDinsight, over the course of the 3 years’ tenure. using a randomized controlled trial (RCT) (at 69% random sampling) that aimed at creating a ‘proof of concept’. Results-based financing consultancy, Instiglio, designed the DIB and provided performance management support to Educate Girls.

Educate Girls assesses the learning outcomes of the children year on year by conducting pre-tests and post-test based on the recognized ASER methodology. As the evaluators of the DIB, IDinsight designed and conducted a three-year impact evaluation of Educate Girls’ program in Bhilwara, Rajasthan. Two outcomes were used to determine the final outcome payments in the Educate Girls DIB. The indicators were learning gains of boys and girls in grades 3-5 and enrollment of out of school girls in the target district..

For the DIB, IDinsight found that Educate Girls surpassed both the targets for learning gains and for enrolment. The final year results declared in July 2018 showed that Educate Girls’ DIB surpassed its target outcomes with 160% of the final learning target and 116% of the final enrolment target achieved. Learning gains were higher for treatment students than for control students across all grades and subjects, and with relatively larger treatment effects among students who were exposed to the program for more years. The effects of Educate Girls’ program on learning gains were large and statistically significant over the three-year program. Students in treatment schools gained learning levels compared to students in control schools. Learning gains for students in these schools were 28% or 0.31 standard deviations larger than gains for students in control schools. During the final year alone, learning levels for students in program schools grew 79% more than their peers in other schools – almost the difference of an entire additional year of instruction. In addition, Educate Girls had enrolled 768 out-of-school girls, representing 92% of all identified out-of-school school girls eligible for enrollment.

Educate Girls is a non-profit that was established in 2007 with a focus on mobilizing communities to support girls’ education in India’s rural and educationally marginalized areas. Educate Girls currently operates successfully in over 18,000 villages in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. The organization works closely with the state Governments and leverages existing investment in schools. Educate Girls has perfected a model of using a community based program model to identify, enroll and retain out-of-school children (both boys and girls) and to improve foundational skills in literacy and numeracy for all children (both girls and boys). This helps deliver measurable results to many children and avoids parallel delivery of services. In addition, Educate Girls complements the government’s efforts under the Right to Education (RTE) act that seeks to ensure that there is universal provision of basic education in India.

Educate Girls has used a Public-Private initiative, to bring on board several agencies to support the achievements of SDG4 goal. Before entering into any new program geography, Educate Girls will secure permissions from the district/state governments to work in those geographies by executing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). Although there are no deliverables committed to the government, the District Manager at Educate Girls meets the Government district level officials on a regular basis and keeps them updated about progress on Educate Girls’ work. Monthly update reports are submitted at both district & state level From an initial project in 500 schools in one district of Rajasthan state, Educate Girls partnered with Education Above All Foundation of Qatar from 2012, which led to a rapid expansion to the current 30,000 schools in 22 Districts in three states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. OOSC enroll in the existing public schools thus eliminating parallel programs. Educate Girls aims to leverage its proven and codified model with high replicability by partnering with like-minded, experienced and competent grassroots NGOs to deliver its core program. This will expedite scale and benefit greater number of children without increasing organizational complexity.

The Educate Girls management realized the need for decentralized planning to accommodate region specific community issues The district managers can therefore plan the community mobilization and training activities in their districts as per the needs on ground. Leveraging innovative advanced analytics, Educate Girls identified that just 5% of the villages in India i.e. 35,000 villages, hold up to 40% or up to 1.5 million of the total OOSG population in India. Between 2019- 2024, Educate Girls aim to target these 35,000 high incidence villages in 4 states of India (Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar states of India) and enroll up to 1.5 million OOSGs back in school. The predictive model will also be used to cluster villages for operational purposes and improve optimization and efficacy in recruitment of staff and community volunteers. This will ensure optimum utilization of resources with better oversight and overall improved program implementation Educate Girls also realizes that it is only through multi-year commitments, such as the Education Above All funding, which makes it possible for a sustained impact over the years. They are therefore seeking long term funding to ensure continuity and provide room for innovation.