The Centre for Social and Economic Progress hosted an internal seminar titled “Perspectives on Girls’ Education” featuring a presentation by Safeena Husain, Founder, Educate Girls. The session, held on August 24, 2026, also featured presentations by Anuradha De, Senior Policy Advisor and Bhuvaneshwari Subramanian, Associate Fellow on CSEP’s work in this area.

About the event

Girls’ education is a critical catalyst for social progress and economic development. Educating girls helps to break the cycle of generational poverty, leads to lower maternal and child mortality rates, and empowers women to make informed decisions about their health, families, and livelihoods. In this regard, this discussion aims to shed light on the work being done on girls’ education by the PROSE (Public Report on Secondary Education) and Collaborative Governance teams at CSEP. Safeena Husain added her perspectives to the discussion, bringing in unique insights into ground-level challenges, community-driven solutions, and transformative strategies that help keep young girls in school.

Opening Remarks

Amarjeet Sinha

Amarjeet Sinhais a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress. From 2022-24, Amarjeet served as Member Public Enterprises Selection Board. He was earlier posted as Advisor to the Prime Minister till 31 July 2021. An Indian Administrative Service (IAS) Officer of Bihar Cadre of 1983 batch, he retired in December 2019 as Secretary, Department of Rural Development, Government of India. He has 41 years of experience in Government, largely in the rural and social sector. He has had the unique distinction of having played a major role in designing Sarva Siksha Abhiyan (India’s main programme for universal education), the National Rural Health Mission, in bringing about governance reforms in programmes for rural areas covering livelihoods (NRLM), employment (MGNREGS), housing (PMAY Gramin), social security (NSAP), skills (DDUGKY), urban development, and road construction (PMGSY).

Amarjeet has taught and lectured in many Public Policy Schools in India. He teaches two courses at the Advanced Management Programme for Public Policy (AMPPP), the flagship public policy course of the Indian School of Business. He also runs a Public Policy in Practice Course for the Institute of Rural Management, Anand. He teaches a course on Devolution, Development and Democracy at Ashoka University. He delivered the ICSSR Annual Lecture 2022 on Bridging the Last Mile in Pro-Poor Public Welfare. He is also an Advisor to Sampark Foundation for frugal innovations on scale in education, on Health and Human Development with the Centre for Social and Economic Progress. He is a Member of the Jury for The Indian Express Governance Awards. He Chaired a committee for suggesting reforms in the MGNREGS, which submitted its report on 4th June 2023. Amarjeet Chairs the Gender Expert Committee of the Reserve Bank Innovation Hub. He is also on the Board of the Indian Institute of Health Management and Research, New Delhi, HelpAge India, PRADAN, and the Centre for Studying Developing Societies (CSDS).

A student at St. Stephen’s College, he topped the Delhi University and is a recipient of the National Talent Scholarship, the Rhodes Scholarship and the Oxford Cambridge Society of India Scholarship. He has also been the President of the St. Stephen’s College Students’ Union Society.

Speaker

Safeena Husain

A social impact leader and author, Safeena Husain is the Founder of Educate Girls, an Indian non-profit that partners with communities to mobilise volunteers and government resources for girls’ education in some of India’s most underserved and remote regions.

In 2026, TIME Women of the Year named Safeena one of its 16 Women of the Year, recognising her global leadership in advancing girls’ education and gender equity. In 2025, she led Educate Girls to a historic milestone, becoming the first Indian non-profit to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award, widely regarded as Asia’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. In 2024, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). In 2023, she became the first Indian woman to receive the WISE Prize for Education in recognition of her transformative work advancing gender equity through education.

Under Safeena’s leadership, Educate Girls has pioneered innovative models that harness the power of community volunteering, most notably through its Team Balika network of over 23,000 community champions who have helped enrol more than 2.2 million out-of-school girls and improve learning outcomes for over 2.5 million children since the organisation’s inception. She also spearheaded the world’s first Development Impact Bond (DIB) in education and led Educate Girls to become Asia’s first organisation selected for TED’s Audacious Project.

In January 2026, her book, Every Last Girl: A Journey to Educate India’s Forgotten Daughters, was launched at the Jaipur Literature Festival. Tracing the remarkable journey of building Educate Girls, the book draws on vivid, first-hand stories from India’s villages and reflects on the persistence required to reach the “last girl”—those farthest from opportunity—and on what becomes possible when communities come together to transform the futures of their daughters.

Drawing on her lived experience, Safeena brings a deep understanding of the challenges faced by marginalised communities. Her vision for the next decade is to empower 10 million learners through scalable, community-driven solutions grounded in volunteerism, participation, and equity.

Discussants

Anuradha De

Anuradha De is a Senior Policy Advisor at CSEP and works on Education and Skills in the Human Development vertical. Over the last three decades she has been engaged in research on various issues in the development sector. She is an economist by training and has been involved in several field-based research on issues related to Education, Health, Nutrition and impact of Technology in governance. She was one of the founding members which set up a not-for-profit research organisation, Collaborative Research and Dissemination (CORD), in 2003 in New Delhi. As part of CORD, she worked in several field-based studies in primary education which includes Public Report on Basic Education in India (PROBE), PROBE Revisited, Research Consortium on Educational Outcomes and Poverty (RECOUP) and Teaching Effectively All Children (TEACH). Other studies include studies on secondary education, studies on MGNREGA payments and exclusions, Public Report on Health (PROH), and Women’s Empowerment in Nutrition Index (WENI). She also works on education policy, education finance and education statistics. She has published extensively in the form of books, journal articles and Newspaper articles.

Bhuvaneshwari Subramanian

Bhuvaneshwari Subramanian completed her PhD from the School of Development Studies, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD). Her academic journey has been driven by a deep interest in interdisciplinarity and her doctoral research focused primarily on the education of the urban poor, integrating the fields of education, sociology, economics, and development studies. She completed an M.Phil. in Planning and Development from IIT Bombay and an MA in Economics from Jamia Millia Islamia. Alongside her academic training, she has also worked directly with marginalised communities and children in organisations such as Teach For India and Pratham Education Foundation, and in research-based roles at the National Foundation for India and IIT Delhi.

All content reflects the individual views of the speakers. The Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) does not hold an institutional view on any subject.

Please contact Gurmeet Kaur at GKaur@csep.org for any queries.