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Recorded at	April 15, 2019
Event	TED2019
Duration (min:sec)	09:45
Video Type	TED Stage Talk
Words per minute	172.54 medium
Readability (FK)	61.09 easy
Speaker	Safeena Husain


1	00:13	The world today has many problems.
2	00:16	And they're all very complicated and interconnected and difficult.
3	00:22	But there is something we can do.
4	00:24	I believe
5	00:25	that girls' education is the closest thing we have to a silver bullet
6	00:30	to help solve some of the world's most difficult problems.
7	00:35	But you don't have to take my word for it.
8	00:37	The World Bank says
9	00:38	that girls' education is one of the best investments
10	00:42	that a country can make.
11	00:44	It helps to positively impact
12	00:46	nine of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
13	00:50	Everything from health, nutrition, employment --
14	00:54	all of these are positively impacted when girls are educated.
15	00:59	Additionally, climate scientists have recently rated girls' education
16	01:04	at number six out of 80 actions to reverse global warming.
17	01:10	At number six, it's rated higher than solar panels and electric cars.
18	01:17	And that's because when girls are educated,
19	01:20	they have smaller families,
20	01:22	and the resulting reduction in population
21	01:25	reduces carbon emissions significantly.
22	01:30	But more than that, you know, it's a problem we have to solve once.
23	01:34	Because an educated mother is more than twice as likely
24	01:39	to educate her children.
25	01:41	Which means that by doing it once,
26	01:43	we can close the gender and literacy gap forever.
27	01:47	I work in India,
28	01:48	which has made incredible progress
29	01:51	in bringing elementary education for all.
30	01:54	However, we still have four million out-of-school girls,
31	01:58	one of the highest in the world.
32	02:01	And girls are out of school because of, obviously poverty,
33	02:05	social, cultural factors.
34	02:07	But there's also this underlying factor of mindset.
35	02:12	I have met a girl whose name was Naraaz Nath.
36	02:15	Naaraaz means angry.
37	02:17	And when I asked her, "Why is your name 'angry'?"
38	02:20	she said, "Because everybody was so angry when a girl was born."
39	02:26	Another girl called Antim Bala,
40	02:28	which means the last girl.
41	02:30	Because everybody hoped that would be the last girl to be born.
42	02:35	A girl called Aachuki.
43	02:38	It means somebody who has arrived.
44	02:40	Not wanted, but arrived.
45	02:43	And it is this mindset
46	02:45	that keeps girls from school or completing their education.
47	02:49	It's this belief that a goat is an asset
48	02:52	and a girl is a liability.
49	02:56	My organization Educate Girls works to change this.
50	03:00	And we work in some of the most difficult, rural,
51	03:03	remote and tribal villages.
52	03:06	And how do we do it?
53	03:07	We first and foremost find
54	03:09	young, passionate, educated youth from the same villages.
55	03:14	Both men and women.
56	03:16	And we call them Team Balika,
57	03:17	balika just means the girl child,
58	03:19	so this is a team that we are creating for the girl child.
59	03:23	And so once we recruit our community volunteers,
60	03:26	we train them, we mentor them, we hand-hold them.
61	03:30	That's when our work starts.
62	03:32	And the first piece we do is about identifying every single girl
63	03:36	who's not going to school.
64	03:38	But the way we do it is a little different and high-tech,
65	03:41	at least in my view.
66	03:44	Each of our frontline staff have a smartphone.
67	03:47	It has its own Educate Girls app.
68	03:49	And this app has everything that our team needs.
69	03:52	It has digital maps of where they're going to be conducting the survey,
70	03:58	it has the survey in it, all the questions,
71	04:00	little guides on how best to conduct the survey,
72	04:03	so that the data that comes to us is in real time and is of good quality.
73	04:08	So armed with this,
74	04:10	our teams and our volunteers go door-to-door
75	04:13	to every single household to find every single girl
76	04:17	who may either we never enrolled or dropped out of school.
77	04:20	And because we have this data and technology piece,
78	04:23	very quickly we can figure out who the girls are and where they are.
79	04:27	Because each of our villages are geotagged,
80	04:29	and we can actually build that information out
81	04:32	very, very quickly.
82	04:34	And so once we know where the girls are,
83	04:37	we actually start the process of bringing them back into school.
84	04:40	And that actually is just our community mobilization process,
85	04:43	it starts with village meetings, neighborhood meetings,
86	04:47	and as you see, individual counseling of parents and families,
87	04:51	to be able to bring the girls back into school.
88	04:53	And this can take anything from a few weeks to a few months.
89	04:59	And once we bring the girls into the school system,
90	05:02	we also work with the schools
91	05:03	to make sure that schools have all the basic infrastructure
92	05:07	so that the girls will be able to stay.
93	05:09	And this would include a separate toilet for girls,
94	05:12	drinking water,
95	05:13	things that will help them to be retained.
96	05:16	But all of this would be useless if our children weren't learning.
97	05:20	So we actually run a learning program.
98	05:23	And this is a supplementary learning program,
99	05:25	and it's very, very important,
100	05:28	because most of our children are first-generation learners.
101	05:31	That means there's nobody at home to help them with homework,
102	05:34	there's nobody who can support their education.
103	05:37	Their parents can't read and write.
104	05:38	So it's really, really key
105	05:40	that we do the support of the learning in the classrooms.
106	05:44	So this is essentially our model,
107	05:46	in terms of finding, bringing the girls in,
108	05:48	making sure that they're staying and learning.
109	05:51	And we know that our model works.
110	05:54	And we know this because
111	05:56	a most recent randomized control evaluation
112	05:59	confirms its efficacy.
113	06:02	Our evaluator found that over a three-year period
114	06:06	Educate Girls was able to bring back 92 percent of all out-of-school girls
115	06:11	back into school.
116	06:13	(Applause)
117	06:20	And in terms of learning,
118	06:21	our children's learning went up significantly
119	06:24	as compared to control schools.
120	06:26	So much so, that it was like an additional year of schooling
121	06:30	for the average student.
122	06:32	And that's enormous,
123	06:33	when you think about a tribal child who's entering the school system
124	06:36	for the first time.
125	06:39	So here we have a model that works;
126	06:41	we know it's scalable,
127	06:43	because we are already functioning at 13,000 villages.
128	06:47	We know it's smart,
129	06:48	because of the use of data and technology.
130	06:51	We know that it's sustainable and systemic,
131	06:54	because we work in partnership with the community,
132	06:57	it's actually led by the community.
133	06:59	And we work in partnership with the government,
134	07:01	so there's no creation of a parallel delivery system.
135	07:05	And so because we have this innovative partnership
136	07:08	with the community, the government, this smart model,
137	07:12	we have this big, audacious dream today.
138	07:17	And that is to solve a full 40 percent of the problem
139	07:20	of out-of-school girls in India in the next five years.
140	07:24	(Applause)
141	07:31	And you're thinking, that's a little ...
142	07:34	You know, how am I even thinking about doing that,
143	07:37	because India is not a small place, it's a huge country.
144	07:42	It's a country of over a billion people.
145	07:44	We have 650,000 villages.
146	07:48	How is it that I'm standing here,
147	07:50	saying that one small organization
148	07:52	is going to solve a full 40 percent of the problem?
149	07:56	And that's because we have a key insight.
150	07:58	And that is,
151	08:00	because of our entire approach, with data and with technology,
152	08:04	that five percent of villages in India
153	08:07	have 40 percent of the out-of-school girls.
154	08:10	And this is a big, big piece of the puzzle.
155	08:13	Which means, I don't have to work across the entire country.
156	08:16	I have to work in those five percent of the villages,
157	08:19	about 35,000 villages,
158	08:21	to actually be able to solve a large piece of the problem.
159	08:25	And that's really key,
160	08:27	because these villages
161	08:29	not only have high burden of out-of-school girls,
162	08:32	but also a lot of related indicators, right,
163	08:35	like malnutrition, stunting, poverty, infant mortality,
164	08:41	child marriage.
165	08:42	So by working and focusing here,
166	08:44	you can actually create a large multiplier effect
167	08:47	across all of these indicators.
168	08:49	And it would mean
169	08:51	that we would be able to bring back 1.6 million girls back into school.
170	08:56	(Applause)
171	09:03	I have to say, I have been doing this for over a decade,
172	09:07	and I have never met a girl who said to me,
173	09:12	you know, "I want to stay at home,"
174	09:13	"I want to graze the cattle,"
175	09:15	"I want to look after the siblings,"
176	09:17	"I want to be a child bride."
177	09:19	Every single girl I meet wants to go to school.
178	09:24	And that's what we really want to do.
179	09:26	We want to be able to fulfill those 1.6 million dreams.
180	09:32	And it doesn't take much.
181	09:33	To find and enroll a girl with our model is about 20 dollars.
182	09:37	To make sure that she is learning and providing a learning program,
183	09:41	it's another 40 dollars.
184	09:43	But today is the time to do it.
185	09:45	Because she is truly the biggest asset we have.
186	09:49	I am Safeena Husain, and I educate girls.
187	09:53	Thank you.
188	09:54	(Applause)

Safeena Husain: A bold plan to empower 1.6 million out-of-school girls in India