No-Cost Extension with Deval Sanghavi

Deval Sanghavi speaks to Safeena Husain, the founder of Educate Girls, an NGO that works to support girls’ education across India. Educate Girls has just completed 14 years, and during this period they have grown from working with fifty schools to working in over 18,000 villages across India and reaching millions of children.

Safeena talks about her own personal journey that led her to set up Educate Girls and how they learnt to use machine learning to identify the most vulnerable locations to work in. She also speaks about how she set up the world’s first Development Impact Bond in education (a proof-of-concept that ties funding to outcomes), what we’re not seeing when it comes to the fate of millions of children post-COVID, and her pet peeves on the structural dynamics of the development sector.

Safeena Husain is the founder of Educate Girls, a non-profit that focuses on mobilizing communities for girls’ education in India’s rural and educationally disadvantaged areas.

For more information on NCE go to dasra.org/nce and follow Deval on Twitter at @Deval_Sanghavi and @Dasra

Deval Sanghavi speaks to Aakash Sethi, the CEO of Quest Alliance, a non-profit organization that equips young people with 21st century skills. Aakash shares what it was like to grow up in a family dedicated to development work, what it means to him to build for a world where young people feel empowered and included, how to grow from loss and the impact of COVID-19 on education in India. They also chat about how Quest has become one of the best places in the development sector to work in, and the importance of eating and sharing together for a thriving work culture.

Aakash Sethi is the CEO of Quest Alliance. Aakash’s work experience in the private sector, working in companies like Microsoft reflects in the manner that he's built Quest, leveraging technology to improve the quality of education and to empower youth to navigate the future of work.

For more information on NCE go to dasra.org/nce and follow Deval on Twitter at @Deval_Sanghavi and @Dasra

Deval Sanghavi speaks to Anu Aga and Meher Pudumjee, a mother and daughter philanthropic team who are deeply committed to equity and inclusion. While many families grapple with intergenerational philanthropy, Anu and Meher are examples of how different perspectives can come together to shape a long-lasting philanthropic engagement.

Anu Aga has been a trailblazing corporate leader when there were a few like her. She has led the energy and environment business Thermax Ltd. Anu is a social worker, and has been a Member of Parliament (in the Rajya Sabha) and is actively engaged with multiple nonprofit organizations in India including Teach for India. Her daughter Meher Pudumjee is the Chairperson of Thermax and is active in many initiatives from chairing Akanksha foundation and in leading efforts and providing greater dignity and equity to informal workers across India through the Social Compact.

For more information on NCE go to dasra.org/nce and follow Deval on Twitter at @Deval_Sanghavi and @Dasra

Deval Sanghavi speaks to Vineet Rai, the Founder and Chairman of Aavishkaar Group, a leading global impact investment platform. Although they have very different perspectives when it comes to development and social change, they share a long friendship that goes back to their early years in the development sector. Listen in as Vineet and Deval talk about the shared idealism that shapes their values, their history of travelling together across the country to learn and understand how issues play out on the ground, how capitalism and philanthropy each approach development, and what impact investing is all about.

(30:00) "Our passion or our argument was that if we can wean away a significant amount of $300 trillion from the “greed is good” narrative to a narrative that is “sustainable is resilient” - that you should be able to create a more equal world using this capital. Then you will be able to have a much greater outcome for the world as usual, maybe not as an investor for yourself."

Vineet Rai is the Chairman and Founder of the Aavishkaar Group, whose ecosystem includes Aavishkaar Capital, an impact fund manager focused on the global south; Arohan, one of India’s largest microfinance institutions for low income households; Ashv Finance, an NBFC that works with MSMEs; IntelleCap, a global impact advisory firm, and Sankalp, a networking platform for impact investors.

Deepa Pawar is the founder and director of the Anubhuti Trust, an organization formed and self-led by women, with the intention to work with youth on developing their leadership so that there are aware and responsible youth in society who can lead change for a more just and equitable world.

In this episode of No-Cost Extension, Deval and Deepa sit down at the Dasra office to talk about the stigmatization of Nomadic and Denotifed Tribes in India from the time of colonial rule, their unacknowledged role in the freedom struggle and how they have been historically viewed as outlaws.

Deepa speaks of how NDT communities cannot be viewed only through the lens of vulnerability and marginalization, the contribution of women in keeping the culture of the community alive, and how Anubhuti Trust places agency and liberty at the heart of their approach to movement building.

She speaks of her accidental entry into the NGO sector, how Anubhuti came to be formed, the various areas their work touches upon - from Dalit activism to anti-caste feminism to environmental justice.

Deepa is also a member of the Rebuild India Fund Investment Committee and discusses the need for the development sector to be experimental, the myopic lens through which we often look at results and success and how funders can sometimes get in the way of the work organisations are trying to do.

For more information on Anubhuti’s work check out their website at https://www.anubhutitrust.org/.

For more information on No-Cost Extension go to https://www.dasra.org/nce and follow Deval on X at @deval_sanghavi and @Dasra

All additional audio courtesy of Anubhuti Trust/Youtube and field recordings.