Safeena Husain: Education Can Restart
In our recent Women in Business Spotlight, Laidlaw Scholar Harshita Jain named Safeena Husain among the leaders who inspire her most, for building a model that has brought hundreds of thousands of girls back into school and for proving that compassion and hard data belong in the same strategy. An LSE graduate, awarded an honorary doctorate by the school in 2024, Husain founded Educate Girls in 2007 and has spent nearly two decades on the problem of girls who have left education, or never entered it.
Safeena Husain: "Education can start, pause, and restart at any point. So do not give up hope. Keep that courage alive."
A Model Built on Finding the Girls Nobody Counted
Educate Girls began in around fifty villages in Pali, Rajasthan. It now works across tens of thousands of villages in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, and has helped more than two million girls back into the classroom. The method rests on identifying precisely which girls are missing, village by village, and mobilising community volunteers to bring them back. Under Husain's leadership the organisation delivered the world's first Development Impact Bond in education, and in 2019 became the first Asian organisation supported by TED's Audacious Project, where it set out to reach 1.5 million out-of-school girls. It passed that number in 2025 and carried on. Educate Girls has since become the first Indian non-profit to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award.
Why the Pause Is Not the End
Husain's own education was interrupted, and she has spoken about watching friends move into higher classes and university while she could not, and about the way confidence falls when that happens. Her quote comes from that experience as much as from the girls she now works to reach. In much of rural India the structures make the pause more likely, with far fewer secondary and high schools than primary ones, so distance and cost turn a temporary interruption into a permanent one. The barriers vary enormously from one life to the next, though the belief underneath her words reaches far beyond the villages where Educate Girls works. Most of us absorb early on that a life is meant to run to a schedule. School, then university, then work, each stage arriving when it should, and the sense that falling behind at any point closes something permanently. Husain's account of education dissolves that. A pause is only a pause, and what resumes after it is often stronger for the interval, shaped by whatever the years away taught you. Her instruction is to keep faith with that possibility while you are still inside the interruption, when nothing is visibly moving and the world seems to have moved on without you.
Values in Focus
Husain's message speaks to the Laidlaw values of being #Ambitious and #Determined, and the Oxford Character Project virtue of #Courage. Ambition, in her case, meant refusing to accept the education she was given and then setting out to change what millions of other girls would be given, one village at a time. Determination is what carries that over the years it takes, treating a setback as a stage rather than a verdict. Courage is what she asks for in the waiting, the willingness to keep believing a path is still open when the evidence in front of you suggests otherwise.
A Call to Reflect
As you consider Safeena Husain's words, we invite you to reflect and share in the comments: what did you return to after a pause, and what made you decide it was still worth pursuing?