SAFEENA HUSAIN

A social impact leader, Safeena Husain is the Founder and Board Member of Educate Girls, an Indian non-profit working towards empowering communities for girls’ education in some of India’s hardest-to-reach villages. Most recently, in recognition of her ongoing work, Safeena received an honorary doctorate from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). This adds to her remarkable achievement in 2023, when she became the first Indian woman to be honoured as a WISE Prize laureate for her contributions to girls' education in rural India.

A true visionary, Safeena’s desire for bold and ambitious impact is backed by a good sense of ground reality. Her lived experience gives her a unique perspective on the problems she is trying to solve. And true to her style, her next big goal is to empower 10 million learners over the next 10 years.

Since its foundation in 2007, Educate Girls has achieved remarkable success, mobilising over 1.8 million girls for enrolment and supporting over 2.2 million students with remedial learning. The organisation works with thousands of community-based gender champions in some of the most rural, remote, and marginalised communities in India to break the cycle of inequality and exclusion.

Under Safeena’s guidance, Educate Girls has become a leading force globally, harnessing innovative financing and technology to bridge the gender gap in education. Under her leadership, Educate Girls delivered the world's first Development Impact Bond in education, an outcomes-based financing model that achieved extraordinary results in both learning and enrolment. She led Educate Girls to become Asia’s first TED Audacious Project, a collaborative funding initiative focusing on scaling solutions to the world's most pressing challenges. Safeena was conferred the NITI Aayog Women Transforming India Award and has received global accolades, including the USAID Millennium Alliance Award, MIT Solve’s Learning for Girls & Women Challenge, Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, and the World Bank India Development Marketplace Award. Safeena grew up in New Delhi and is an alum of the London School of Economics.