Nine months into her job, Safeena decided to switch to the development sector, first volunteering with International Development Exchange and then joining Child Family Health International, where she was the CEO and Executive Director by the time she quit to move to India to set up Educate Girls. Over 11 years, the non-profit has brought 380,000 out-of-school girls into the education system and is now dreaming a bigger, more audacious dream.

Educate Girls has just become the first organisation in Asia to be named an Audacious project. The Audacious Project invites visionary social entrepreneurs and non-profits to dream bigger and to shape those dreams into viable and sustainable multi-year plans. The project invites donors to pool resources and work together in service of these ambitious ideas. 

In this interview with ILSS, Safeena speaks about the journey of Educate Girls, the lessons learnt from implementing the world’s first development impact bond in the education sector, and the dream to impact over 16 million children in five years.

Why educate? Why educate girls?

Having worked in the health and social justice space during my years with International Development Exchange and Child Family Health International, I was also acutely aware when I came back to India in 2004 that I owed this big journey to my education. I grew up with a lot of difficulties—having seen poverty, violence, and so on—but I was able to overcome all that because of my education. That’s why I wanted to do something in girls’ education.

Girls’ education is the closest we have to a silver bullet to address some of the most pressing problems in society. It helps solve nine of the 17 global sustainable development goals. Once you educate a girl, she’s 200 percent more likely to educate her children.  You can address so many issues with it– nutrition, malnutrition rates, stunting, immunisation, and so on. Climate scientists recently rated girls’ education as Number 6 out of 80 actions that can address climate change — higher than electric cars and solar panels!

It’s also the right and the moral thing to do – it’s about justice and equality.

You chose to work in some of the toughest regions of India as far as girls’ ability to access education is concerned. What took you there?

When I decided to start working in India, I asked the Ministry of Human Resource Development to tell me the most challenging areas for girls’ education. They gave me a list of 26 critical gender gap districts, nine of which were in Rajasthan. I decided to go there since, from the very beginning, I was thinking of building a programme that could be scaled to the most difficult geographies.  

We started with 50 schools, went up to 500 and then covered an entire district. Since the government described the problem with the district as a unit, we made that our unit of replication too. We started adding more districts. The underlying factor working against girls’ education was patriarchy – it was a mindset issue and since mindsets feed off each other, it was not enough to work in a subset of villages; we had to work in ALL the villages. Only then would mindsets change, and the entire district shift to a different equilibrium.  

What ambition did you set out with when you started Educate Girls in 2007? Does that ambition look different from where you are today?

When I started out the ambition was to take these critical gender gap districts and saturate them completely. Even today the spirit remains the same, but our ambitions are now much bigger. We want to work with 16 million children in the next five years—over the next five years, we’re going to triple what we have done in the last five years.

Earlier we would use government data, but now that we have 10 years of our own household-level data and we are using machine learning and artificial intelligence to be able to predict for our hotspots and do precision targeting. Adopting a results-based approach allows us to look at the sharpest tools to get to the result.

What does the journey to 16 million kids look like? What would it take Educate Girls as an organisation – internally as well as externally – to achieve this?

A lot of things will need to change. We will need to become growth-ready to scale exponentially; internal proceses and systems will have to be tightened. Adoption of technology—digitisation, automation—in our core programme and our support functions will form the backbone of this kind of scale and growth.

The biggest factor as we scale is our people. How do we ensure that everybody stays mission-aligned as we scale? As a founder, it is my job to ensure that our five-year vision and strategy is aligned to the cause. As a founder and at the board level, it is also our responsibility to ensure that there is no mission drift or mission creep.

How do the challenges faced by a founder change as an organisation moves from start-up to scale-up?

At the early stage or the test phase, the problems I faced as a founder were very much about finding that early stage seed funding – and the right funding that knows that it is seed funding and will give the room to iterate, evolve, fail, rebuild and get stronger. That’s where Dasra helped me – I was their first giving circle. That three-year pool of unrestricted funding was a lucky break for us.

Talent was another challenge – nobody wants to join you when you’re starting up. I couldn’t even find members to join my board – I had to ask my husband to sit on my board till I found others! Training, capacity building, planning for scale, constantly iterating and codifying the human economics are all very challenging. 

The challenges of running a scaled-up or scaling programme are very different. Predominantly it is about managing complexity:  people, money, external relations. The challenge is to keep complexities to a bare minimum at this stage.  You want the large ship to be nimble and dynamic but the way you do it becomes a lot harder.

As a leader, what I need to control is my personal time.  At Educate Girls, we have created a structure that helps me focus more sharply and give a lot more time to critical areas such as strategy, planning and problem solving. We’ve built this organisation to be highly decentralised. We realise that the best solutions lie closer to the ground and have created systems that allow decision-making and course correction at the ground level. As you grow, you also need to watch out for mission drift and remain a learning organisation.

What made you think of going the development impact bond (DIB) route? What would be the key learnings for Educate Girls and for the rest of the sector from this effort?

As we started scaling rapidly, I wanted to ensure that we were scaling quality and outcomes rather than activity. Whether we scale to 10 girls or 10 million, I wanted the DNA of the organisation to deliver to the result. That’s the main reason I went the DIB route.

Let’s look at the results. We were able to enrol 92 percent of all out-of-school girls over three years. In terms of learning gains, we achieved 25 percent of our learning targets in Year 1; by Year 2, that was around 50 percent; by Year 3, we achieved 160 percent of our learning target. The overall learning gain in the final year alone was equal to an additional year of schooling for a child.

We could achieve this because we were very focused on the target. The key was that everybody knew what the destination was. The teams closer to the ground knew exactly what they had to do to get to the target. So, it led to high decentralisation, accountability and financial and operational flexibility. It meant that we were not holding our teams accountable to the line item on the budget, we were holding them accountable to the result. The field teams also became much more data oriented as a result of working this way.

All this was possible because the funding was multi-year, flexible and focused on a result rather than an activity. In traditional funding too if the grants move from activities to outcomes, the results would be much higher.  Donors will achieve much better results when they hold organisations accountable to results rather than prescribe what to do with the funds.

Do you see the pay-for-success model becoming more popular in the sector?

DIBs are very high-stake transactions. They are still evolving, and it will be a while before we see these instruments scale or become mainstream. What we need to do right now is take those elements of the DIB that get us closer to the results faster and see how they can be integrated into traditional approaches. That’s a more scalable model.

The DIB approach is great for R&D, it helps us find the shortest and fastest way to get to our results and then embed the learnings in our regular programmes. It encourages innovation and risk-taking; it allows you to iterate and course-correct. However, It’s not appropriate for all kinds of organisations. It is best suited for highly measurable programmes and fairly mature organisations.

How does Educate Girls support its leadership team?

The biggest bottleneck is the founder. So more than anything, over the past year I have invested in mentors and coaches, who help me be of best use to the organisation. Our team members also have mentors who they reach out to for guidance. Besides, our board members have taken on the role of mentoring some of our team members. We’ve made a conscious choice to build our board to support and protect our strategy and organisation.

What are the things that give you hope about girls’ education in India?

Despite all the challenges and barriers, every single girl I have met so far wants an education. No girl has ever said to me that she wants to be confined to the home, cooking, fetching water and grazing cattle. No girl wants to be married at a young age and raise children. She wants to go to school. This for me is the greatest source of hope!

The post ‘The spirit remains the same, the ambition is bigger’ appeared first on India Leaders for Social Sector.

Unlike most of us, Anshu couldn’t look away when, as a young journalist, he encountered the truth about Delhi’s winter deaths: It’s not the cold that kills people, it’s the lack of clothing. That’s what set him on a mission that has since earned him the sobriquet of India’s Clothing Man. In 1998, he quit his corporate job and set up Goonj, with wife Meenakshi as co-founder.

Over the years, Goonj has successfully built a model that uses discarded material as currency to address rural and urban issues such as, water, environment, livelihoods, education, health, disaster relief and rehabilitation. As Goonj celebrates its 20^th anniversary, Anshu, who was conferred the Magsaysay Award in 2015, talks about his journey so far, the leadership challenges he faces, and why social justice is not just the responsibility of development sector professionals. Edited excerpts from the interview.

When you look back at the last 20 years, what gives you the most satisfaction?

Sometimes one thinks that one is hopeful because one is hopeful – there’s no logic to it. And then, one sees the good work done in the last 20 years, not only by Goonj but by so many other organisations, and one feels there is indeed reason to be hopeful.

Looking back, we can’t claim to have changed hundreds of thousands of lives. The fact remains that we can only bring some change, make a small dent in people’s lives and that too with their support. At Goonj we have just done that, and we have been fortunate enough to be able to do that across a geographical spread through various initiatives. Making sure that people understand their own power instead of depending on people like us, is a good start. It’s a good reason to feel happy about.

Is Indian society in general, leaving the social sector aside, doing enough to address questions of social inequity and injustice?

There’s something wrong for sure. We need to think why people don’t care enough. It’s like witnessing an accident on a highway: you are speeding in the opposite direction when you see the accident, you feel shocked, but you keep driving until you reach a place where you can sip a cup of tea, wash your face and then move on. The accident—and the emotion you felt when you first saw it—is quickly forgotten, and you go your way.

Most of us feel that we are immune to these things, that they will happen only to someone else. This, unfortunately, is the new normal.

I’m surprised that a lot of people expect the social sector alone to do all the good work. Doing good is a collective responsibility. People like us, who wear good clothes and have a good education, think it’s our right to have these privileges. We forget that basic education is the right of every kid in this country, but half of them don’t even make it past Class 10. We must realise that we are grossly privileged. It’s important therefore to pay back.

If the county progresses, it’s not just one section of the society that will benefit — we will all benefit.

How can people begin engaging with social problems?

By getting into action. If all of us start doing that, in whatever domain we want, in whatever is bothering us–be it polythene bags, paan marks on public property, the poor state of our zebra crossings, whatever it is—that’s a good beginning. Start alone, start with family or friends, just start. If 10 people listen to you, five will oppose; but look at the positive side. I believe that logic is largely an excuse for not doing something. So, be a doer. India doesn’t need any more thinkers for some time; we need doers, we need action and initiative. There are thousands of small organisations that are doing good work, and if you don’t want to lead, you can always follow them.

How would you describe your journey as a founder and a leader?

When you get into action, you explore something new every day, not only about your team, your work and the potential of your work, but also about yourself. As you and your organisation grow, there is a growing expectation of you and the organisation, not just from the world but also from yourself.

‘Leader’ and ‘follower’ are words that indicate a certain relationship: without the follower, there would be no leader. For people like us—who are not spiritual gurus or political leaders, many of whom can afford to talk without delivering much—the only way to get people within and outside the organisation to follow us, is to practise what we preach.  It’s my responsibility to take care of the institution and be aware of any word-action gap in myself as a leader and as an individual.

As a founder, it’s not enough that I speak to the world; regular conversations with the team ensure that I am not cut off from the last person in the team. Wherever I go, I spend time with the larger local team, even if for 15 minutes. That’s something other colleagues also have to do. It’s important to keep the connect.

In the growth phase of an organisation, admin work consumes a lot of time. But I guess it’s a package deal – it’s not like all the good work will come to you and the unpleasant work will go to someone else. When it feels mundane and not worth your time, remember that this is part of your dream: you’ve built an institution and you want replication to happen; so, you have no option but to work on those nuts and bolts to build a ready model for people to take away.

You often speak about democratic leadership. How do you make it work at Goonj?

We practise a guided democracy, wherein people have a lot of freedom to think and act; there’s an outline whose contours can change over time, but people know the non-negotiables. Freedom is as important as responsibility and delivery.

Over the last 20 years we have assured our team members that they can grow to their potential as we won’t bring in someone senior from outside the organisation. That gives them space and opportunity to grow within the organisation. It also builds a lot of trust.

One of the reasons for our growth is the quality of our leadership in different states. We seek to create a strong sense of ownership in our team members about the work they do. People in the communities don’t always recognise me, but they relate very well with the head of their local Goonj chapter. This sense of ownership is built in small ways, such as insisting that important emails go out from the colleague who’s managing the project, ensuring that local teams interact with local media, and so on.  That is a spirit we see being transferred from one generation of colleagues to the next as well. Since these things look very small, organisations often take them for granted–and that’s where gaps start happening.

We also move people across roles, so they see how they are interdependent and connected. Thus, a person in the product design and production team must recognise that their job is made possible by those who sort raw materials at our processing centre. If the field team didn’t work efficiently, why would we need a team to talk about money? Each member is a part of the same value chain and we can’t afford to have even a single link collapse.

We have a flat organisation, without designations. We are called Team Goonj. We see growth in terms of how our understanding and actions evolve. However, the larger world is used to seeing growth only in terms of changing designations. We do struggle sometimes when there are pressures from within and outside to introduce designations but, so far, we have manged the issue as a team.  When the need arises, we will see how to address it without changing our core philosophy.

What are the questions that you contemplate as a leader?

Maintaining the organisation’s value system is an ongoing issue. Building a value system is easier than maintaining it. For an organisation that often takes on the establishment, challenges the status quo, it’s not always an easy journey.

Maintaining trust in one’s team is vital. Organisations often create policies that are aimed at pre-empting one or two team members who may misuse a benefit, thus overlooking the goodness of a vast majority of team members. It is important to take care of the individuals in the organisation. Leaders and organisations tend to invest in machines, processes and systems, but in the end, it is the people who take the story home.

I constantly think about the language we use in the social sector to describe our relationships with the people we work with. To me, someone setting up a small organisation in a remote village of Kalahandi, with no resources other than a deep passion for change and a great understanding of the ground reality, is a real CEO and a dreamer.  I must respect them because they are a part of my larger dream. I’m not a donor and they are not a beneficiary. I am because they are.

Another issue of concern is the lack of understanding about societal issues and ground realities on the part of several CSR teams. This manifests in various ways, from the demand for unnecessary documentation, to insensitive display of branding, and the refusal to look beyond their immediate surroundings. While we do have CSR partners who understand our work and walk miles with us, there are also many organisations for whom concern for the country, social issues and development stops within 50 km of their offices, as though the villages of India did not even exist!

What next for Goonj and for Anshu Gupta?

There’s a lot to do still. I often say that development happens when one goes from zero to one, but when I look back at our two decades of work, I see that we have largely been working on moving people from minus to zero, meaning basic survival. So, there is a long way to go. One dream is to see how we can replicate the idea of turning urban discard into a currency for working on neglected issues of people in other countries and contexts.

Changing the language of the development sector is an important work in progress. We want to challenge demeaning words like ‘donor’ and ‘beneficiary ‘ and tell people that everyone is a stakeholder. We want to challenge the myth that we, the people in good clothes, know both the problem and the solution; we want to prove that people at the grassroots have much more to give.  We want to dispel the myths and the mistrust around the development sector.

I look forward to working with farmers, standing with hundreds of new initiatives, working with new entrepreneurs and people bitten by the social change bug.

Any regrets? Anything you wish you had done differently?

No, I have no regrets. It’s easy to look back after five years and say you could have done something differently, but if your intention was honest then that’s all that matters. You did what you thought was best at that time, you didn’t know any better then. It’s not possible for one organisation to do everything. Whatever we couldn’t do at Goonj, others can do. It might be an unfair world, but it is very generous at least in giving everyone enough opportunities to do something good, something meaningful.

The post ‘Doing good is a collective responsibility’ appeared first on India Leaders for Social Sector.

How do you think Indian philanthropy has evolved over the years? How have the approaches and discussions around giving developed?

I think Indian philanthropy is at an exciting stage; it is continually evolving. One of the most interesting things is that the ecosystem of philanthropy is evolving too, along with philanthropy itself and the idea of giving. Like yourself [India Leaders for Social Sector], there are many ecosystem players that are coming up, looking at leadership in the sector, matchmaking between donors and recipients, building the capacities of the sector, looking at bringing new issues to the fore, and so many other things [such as] auditing the sector. And, of course, with so much more wealth creation happening in the country, the spotlight is on what that wealth is doing for the country – I think we are seeing many interesting developments in Indian philanthropy

Is that increased philanthropic wealth doing enough?

No, I think we need the philanthropic muscle in India to be exercised much more. There are some constraints, though, as to why that’s not happening as much as we would like to see.

One factor is the trust deficit. Although the wealthy want to give, there is a lot of philanthropic capital all dressed up and with nowhere to go, largely because of this trust deficit. How do you give, who do you give to, how do you get impact? You still don’t feel very sure, because of which many of us just land up creating our own organisations, trying to create the change ourselves.

I believe that a healthier thing is when the donors – I am speaking about the super wealthy—find enough channels to give through so that there is no burden of doing things themselves: because we do need a thriving civil society in a democracy. Civil society actors come from passion, from vision, from innovation, from being tied to their communities and from having deep and great context. Having a thriving civil society in a trustworthy, trusting relationship, with donors is something I consider ideal in a democracy. I think we are a little far away from that.

What opportunities must Indian philanthropy invest in to make a larger, lasting impact?

Building the capacities of the system is important. Unless the pipeline opens up to receive funds, you will not see philanthropy grow. I talked about trust before – that’s important too. But also models of how things are really working in, say, education, health, environment, climate change, livelihoods… there are a hundred things where philanthropy should invest in, including the arts and culture. We need museums, we need performance-based culture to be supported, we need new institutions that allow people to understand the world around them. Different people are working in these areas based on their passion.

But I also think that when we talk of the disparities in India and how far behind some people are left, we have no choice but to go back to talking about the human rights framework. Some donors feel uncomfortable about this because of various things they don’t quite understand: does that mean hyper activism, does that mean getting into trouble with the state?

No matter what you call it, it is about caring about the 300 million people in this country who are our fellow citizens, who need to be supported, who need help across the board. How can Indian philanthropists, those who want to change the world for the better, start thinking a little innovatively to work with this segment?

We need to look into the future, for what’s coming at us, whether it is livelihoods, the future of work or climate change—that’s where philanthropic capital should want to step in because they can afford to take risks, they can afford to do the things that the government cannot afford to do, things that civil society doesn’t yet have the support to imagine doing. This is the kind of challenge and opportunity for the Indian philanthropic sector.

Do you believe talent can be a limiting factor as organisations in the social sector aim for scale and sustainability?

With 1.3 billion people, we shouldn’t have to talk about the lack of talent. I think the talent is there, the grooming of the talent needs to be taken very seriously. In this sector, we must not forget to ask if there is enough commitment: if we can draw people’s commitment, people’s passion, people’s real need for their lives to have meaning, then I don’t think talent or human resources is a problem.

Having said that, because of the way the sector is growing, we really need different kinds of skills for the specific things that we need to do. I think people are recognising it. People like ILSS are coming into the sector to create the necessary talent, but we have some years to go, no doubt about it.

What can civil society organisations do to develop their leadership pipeline? How can funders help this effort?

I think we have a succession crisis in the sector right now. Many of the organisations came out of some cataclysmic events in the sixties and the seventies that brought out this amazing moral leadership in this country, which has for the last 30-40 years built a very solid civil society foundation. We are seeing succession issues in many of these organisations: after that one dynamic founder is gone, then what? We do have a leadership crisis in the sector. What ILSS and some others are doing to create the next generation of leaders is very important.

Inside organisations people really grapple with creating leadership. So, if CSR could support short courses for organisations to build their leadership, it could be very useful. Funders need to support much more institutional capacity and much more sector capacity. Leadership doesn’t come out of a vacuum and if funders could begin to think like this, it would really help.

Given the current context, what skill sets would you like to see in the social sector?

Of late I’ve been thinking, is there a lack of imagination, are we suffering from a lack of imagination? I mean, look at how the problems are outpacing the solutions. I’m not criticising; I see myself as a part of the sector so, if anything, this is a reflection rather than a criticism.

When Gandhiji just picked up a fistful of salt, what was he launching? When Vinobaji was talking about bhoodan, what was his imagination? It was not for one district, it was not even for one nation, it was for all of humanity. When Jayaparakashji started the Sampoorna Kranti and Sarvodaya, they were talking about transforming humanity itself. Have we lost some of this spirit? How do we spark our imagination to think much bigger?

The second thing is that, while we unleash our imagination, we should also be putting our noses to the grindstone to be much more rigorous in finding out what really works and how to build systematic structures around it. That is another skill we need to build. One more thing I would like to add is about sharing and collaboration: so, for example, if you are working in education, being curious to know what someone is working on somewhere else and being able to reach out for that.

How can the talent in corporate India engage more deeply with the social sector?

It would be great if corporate professionals, who’ve made a success of their lives, could see the kind of problems that are emerging and how they can apply their skills to solve some of those. It would be great if they start to reflect on how they would like to see the world become better and then agree to spend some of their personal time understanding that issue — because they are not just professionals, consumers, or subjects of the state; they are citizens first.

And to be a citizen means to engage with other people and to take responsibility for creating a better society because today we are more interconnected than ever. So, when we get out of our offices and cabins, how can we reconnect with all the other things that really make our lives meaningful beyond our jobs? There are so many opportunities now; there are so many young people with amazing ideas, who want to engage corporate professionals. Go and find out who’s nearest to you and I promise it will make your life richer.

What is the one cause that is closest to your heart?

The common thread in all my work is around giving people a sense of their own involvement in resolving whatever the situation may be. Whether I work in water or environment or in issues of young males in this county or the climate collaborative, that’s at the core: how do we distribute the ability to solve, how do we help people collaborate with each other? No amount of pushing solutions down the pipeline can create anything sustainable. So how do we build the strength of the samaj sector? That’s the underlying issue that I care about.

A new area I am working on are the 250 million young males in this country – from puberty to the age at which they are supposed to be settled with jobs and families, but are not–and the frustration, the restlessness, the helplessness, the fear, the insecurity associated with being forced into patriarchal identities without even having thought much about it, without having role models or family connections sometimes.

How little we have done for that cohort in this country! Can we devise programmes that allow for more positive modelling for these young men so that they can be the best they want to be? This is something I have been engaged with, primarily to empower the young males themselves, but also because if we don’t focus more on them, we are never going to achieve our women’s empowerment goal. Empowering women is absolutely necessary, but to send an empowered woman into a disempowered situation gives her very bad choices.

The most ambitious thing I’ve done so far is in the context of societal platforms thinking. Societal problems are so complex that they require samaj, sarkaar and bazaar to work together; but it’s very difficult for them to work together in a really effective way. So, what can we do to reduce the friction and enable these sectors to collaborate? Can we create a technology backbone? How can we keep unpacking the commonalities across these sectors so that contextual solutions can be built on top of them? How can we build something that is unified but not uniform, so that we can allow diversity to scale? How can we allow real collaboration and co-creation, and at the same time create an engine that will offer all the data when it is needed and also allow people to learn? It’s a big play; it may work, or it may not work, but we’re very excited and enthused about it.

What role do you see for technology in the civil society space?

I’ve begun to realise that if you want to respond to problems at the scale and the urgency at which they are spreading, civil society really needs to rethink its relationship with technology. I risk saying that when we see emergent backlash against technology for various good reasons. When you’re going to be technology-led you’re going to have problems, if you’re technology-enabled, you’re going to have different opportunities.

A very crucial thing I’ve learned is that when the young people of this country are going to be digital citizens, civil society has no choice but to be digital. Even to be able to respond to the abuse of technology, it has to learn to act in technology domains. At Arghyam we are trying to see how we can be an infrastructure provider instead of just a donor.

A digital civil society, where you offer checks and balances on a digital age, is something we need to strengthen in India.

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