Safeena Husain, 54, was with a gaggle of youngsters celebrating a studying milestone in a small village exterior Udaipur, Rajasthan, when she requested considered one of them why her schooling had been interrupted. The lady had handed her Class X with Pragati, a second probability programme provided by Husain’s award-winning non-profit Educate Girls. Pragati was designed for older girls who’re ineligible for formal education. “I’m 18,” she instructed Husain. “I left education 10 years ago when I was married.”
Husain simply received the distinguished Ramon Magsaysay Award (the primary for an Indian organisation) for her almost two decade previous labour of affection. She nearly didn’t reply the frantic messages she acquired from an unknown Philippines quantity on a latest Sunday, asking for “some data and information”, as a result of “I thought it was a fraud”.
Husain empathises with the youthful lady’s battle as a result of at present she is a kind of uncommon people who find themselves capable of channel their childhood trauma to remodel society. Now in celebration mode, she would quite not discuss in regards to the tough days, saying solely that it was a “very turbulent” childhood in Delhi. School was at all times her “place of happiness” and the place she felt protected. “Walking home from the bus stop was always the toughest time of day for me,” she says.
Paradigm shift
Husain’s schooling was interrupted for 3 years after Class XII. “Everybody gives up on you, they say ‘marry her off’, there’s a divorcee with four kids…” She grappled with that traditional triumvirate of guilt, disgrace, failure till an aunt, a buddy from Lucknow University the place her interfaith mother and father met and fell in love, took her residence to reside with her and altered her life. “She gave me a lot of love, affection and the motivation to go back to education.” Husain finally graduated with a level in economics historical past from the London School of Economics. “I still remember standing on Houghton Street,” she says, referring to the varsity’s location. “The way I saw myself shifted that day and how the world saw me shifted that day.” Education reworked her life and he or she needs all girls to know that feeling.
Most girls know schooling is the one option to get forward, Husain says. Like the lady who accomplished her education almost two a long time after she left faculty — and in the identical yr as her son, scoring greater than him. Or the Bhil girls who’re the primary of their households to get a proper schooling. And the younger lady who left a foul marriage and doesn’t need to unload greens at 3 a.m. for the remainder of her life.
Husain got here back to India in 2005 and began Educate Girls two years later. The non-profit works in about 30,000 villages (primarily in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh). “We have brought over two million girls back into school,” she says. “An equal number have gone through our learning programme, which is the foundational literacy and numeracy programme.”
Safeena Husain with schoolchildren
Push for second possibilities
Some 30,000 girls have graduated from the Pragati programme. “Right now a lot of energy is going into expanding the second chance programme and also taking it to other states,” Husain says. “Because that’s a huge problem, much more rampant than elementary school issues for out-of-school girls.”
Societal and systemic points can weave an impenetrable wall round girls, forcing them to drop out after the eighth grade. Marriage, family duties and mobility restrictions all develop into limitations to additional schooling. “For every 100 primary schools, you have 40 middle schools, and 24 secondary schools, which means the distance to school increases and access drops off,” Husain provides.
Those who do keep, face quite a lot of stress. “I see a lot of girls approach secondary school with an enormous amount of fear. They have this sword hanging over the head with their parents saying. ‘I’m sending you but if you fail, I’m going to make you sit at home or get you married off’,” she says. “It leads to a lot of anxiety.”
Husain works with state governments and says she’s seen large adjustments in two a long time — from separate bathrooms for girls to even a marketing campaign resembling ‘Beti Bachao’ that acknowledges there’s a drawback. “You know, the right to education came after we started work,” she says. “So I have seen the struggle, but I have also seen how rapidly progress has happened. I think one must acknowledge that as well because that’s the only thing that gives you hope to continue.” Rajasthan’s complete free secondary schooling programme for girls has additionally been a recreation changer.
Husain’s additionally seen attitudes come full circle. One father who, a few years in the past, was in opposition to sending his daughter to highschool lately instructed her: “You have to educate girls. The world is built for the educated and if we are not educated, we will be exploited like animals.”
Safeena Husain in Udaipur, Rajasthan
Family issues
Like her mother and father, Husain had an interfaith marriage. She met director Hansal Mehta when she organised a Bollywood dinner for creator and Booker Prize winner Daisy Rockwell in Berkeley University. Her father Yusuf, who ran a journey firm, was by then an actor in Hindi cinema, and related her to her favorite director whose 2000 movie Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar she had cherished.
“We’ve just been together since,” she says. “It was one of those things, you meet and you know it’s meant to be.” The couple lived collectively for years and have two daughters, finally solely marrying in 2022. “Losing my father during COVID was a big moment,” she says. “It made us feel like we needed to do something more affirmative for ourselves and for our children.”
Her daughters navigate their mother and father’ very totally different worlds adroitly. When she was driving by way of Uttar Pradesh a few years in the past with considered one of her daughters, they noticed a line of girls carrying firewood and strolling in a single file on the freeway. Her daughter instantly piped up: “Why isn’t Educate Girls helping them?”
The author is a Bengaluru-based journalist and the co-founder of India Love Project on Instagram.
