Project Partner: Educate Girls
Geographies: India
What is the core idea of the pilot?
In India, a 10th grade credential is critical for entry-level jobs, formal loans, vocational training, and other life chances:
- 120 million women aged 15-29 in India
- Over 50% have not completed secondary education
- More than 90% are not formally or informally skilled
- 82 million young women are Not in Education, Employment, Entrepreneurship or Training (NEET)
- The limited number of secondary schools and fragmented open school systems in Indian states further exclude girls from accessing their 10th-grade education
Pragati is a second chance programme for adolescent girls and young women (15 – 29 years old) from low-income households in remote, rural and hardest to reach geographies of India. The project aims to enable Grade 10 credentialing and connecting them to further opportunities like education, training and employment.
Why is this innovative?
This is a scalable, replicable, results-based programme model that can address the toughest obstacles for the most marginalised girls and women at a hyperlocal level, in effort to address the problem from both the demand and supply sides.
1. Bottom-up approach - Camp Delivery (Addressing the demand side of the problem)
- To deliver proximate in-person, village-based learning camps of 6 months duration to enrol girls in state open schools and support their grade 10 exam preparation via mentors (Preraks).
2. Top-down approach- Government Partnership (Addressing the supply side of the problem)
- To work with the state governments to build well-functioning open schools in states that lack them or enhance existing ones
- A learner-centric open school system will improve the accessibility of current open schools in rural and remote geographies.
What will success look like?
Enable 10 million learners in 10 years, by combining education with skilling and access to economic opportunities tp improve girls’ agency in the long term:
- Probability of a girl marrying reduces by 6% for each additional year she stays in secondary education
- Women in salaried jobs are 23% more likely to have a say in key household issues
- Skilled rural women are > 5x likely to be in salaried/ self- employed job
How will success be achieved?
- Aim to work with 40,000 adolescent girls and young women in some of the hardest-to-reach geographies, to enable their social and financial inclusion by identifying, enrolling, preparing, and making them appear for grade 10 examination in respective state open schools
- Building Pragati Technology Platform to ensure ease of access to content and scalability at a population level scale
- Performance Management System (PMS) that will provide visibility on camp activities and learning
- Learning Management System (LMS) that will provide standardized content and online assessments to learners and preraks
- Agreement with government of Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan to support the state in establishing or enhancing the State Open School system
- Outreach to 25,000 learners
Who is leading the project?
Established in 2007 by Safeena Husain, Educate Girls is a non-profit organisation that focuses on mobilising communities for girls’ education in India’s rural and educationally disadvantaged areas. Strongly aligned with the Right to Education Act (2009), Educate Girls aims to achieve behavioural, social, and economic transformation for all girls toward an India where all children have equal opportunities to access quality education.
Educate Girls has scaled from a 500-school pilot in 2007 to over 50,000+ schools in over 29,000+ villages across 85+ administrative districts in India. With the help of a network of 23,000+ community volunteers, Educate Girls has enrolled over 1.8 million out-of-school girls into schools, retained 91% of them year on year, and improved learning outcomes for over 2.21 million children in grades 3-5.
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