Pragati - Enabling 10th Grade for 10 Million in 10 Years

Programme Partner: Educate Girls

Region :India

In India, girls aged 15 and over who have dropped out of school before completing their 10th grade are at a permanent risk of never completing their secondary education. Secondary schooling is a very crucial stage for them, but they grow older with a paucity of local educational and economic opportunities which permanently limit their potential for advancement and independence. Barriers stemming from patriarchy, poverty, and policy gaps, such as not having access to a proximate upper primary or secondary school, early marriage and motherhood, academic setbacks, and migration, have been exacerbated over the last few years by the pandemic.

In a country with about 120 million women aged 15-29, over 50% have not completed secondary education, more than 90% are not formally or informally skilled, and a staggering 82 million young women are Not in Education, Employment, or Training (NEET). Educate Girls has been enabling girls aged between 5 to 14 years to have equal opportunities for accessing quality education in India’s rural and educationally backward areas since 2007 in alignment with India’s Right to Education Act. In 2021, we launched a ‘second chance’ programme called Pragati to enable adolescent girls and women aged 15-29 from low-income households to have agency over their decisions through a pathway of 10th grade credentialling, skilling, and livelihood opportunities for economic advancement.

In India, a 10th grade credential is critical for entry-level jobs, formal loans, vocational training, and other life chances. Educate Girls is empowering India's forgotten potential and unlocking futures, one girl at a time. Our goal is to enable 10th Grade credentialling for 10 million in 10 years, and our strategy is to optimise the government's open schooling system and catalyse a network of mission-aligned civil society organisations to deliver Pragati at scale. Over the next 2 years we aim to work with 95,000 adolescent girls and young women in some of the hardest to reach geographies to enable their social and financial inclusion through a pathway of education.