Rajasthan’s ‘Educate Girls’ NGO Wins Ramon Magsaysay Award 2025

Rajasthan’s non-profit organization, ‘Foundation to Educate Girls Globally’ / ‘Educate Girls’ has been selected for the Ramon Magsaysay Award 2025. It is the first Indian organization to receive this prestigious award.

• Dedicated to mobilizing community and government resources for girls’ education in rural and educationally deprived areas of India, the Indian non-profit organization ‘Foundation to Educate Girls Globally’ / ‘Educate Girls’ has been awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award 2025.
• Known as Educate Girls, this foundation is the first Indian organization to receive this prestigious award, considered equivalent to the Nobel Prize in Asia. This foundation, established in Rajasthan, was founded in 2007 by Safeena Husain.
• Each recipient will be given a medal, a certificate, and a cash prize. The 67th Ramon Magsaysay Award will be presented on 7 November 2025 at the Metropolitan Theater in Manila.

Other winners

• Other winners of the year 2025 include Shahina Ali of Maldives for her environmental work and Flaviano Antonio L. Villanueva of the Philippines for his contribution.

“Educate Girls”

• With the motto “One girl at a time,” Educate Girls identified the most needy communities in terms of girls’ education, brought out-of-school girls into classrooms, and worked to retain them until they became eligible for higher education and gainful employment.

World’s first Development Impact Bond

• In 2015, Educate Girls launched the world’s first Development Impact Bond (DIB) in the field of education, which directly linked financial support to measurable outcomes.
• The foundation said, “It began with 50 pilot rural schools and eventually reached more than 30,000 villages in the most deprived areas of India, benefiting more than 2 million girls and maintaining a continuation rate of over 90 percent.”
• The organization also launched an open-schooling program called Pragati, which enables young women aged 15–29 to complete their education and access lifelong opportunities. This program started with 300 learners and has since expanded to over 31,500 participants.

India’s previous Ramon Magsaysay Award winners

• In 1958, Acharya Vinoba Bhave became the first Indian to receive this award. Other notable social workers include Mother Teresa (1962), politician Jayaprakash Narayan (1965), filmmaker Satyajit Ray (1967), journalist Arun Shourie (1982), former IPS officer Kiran Bedi (1994), RTI activist Aruna Roy (2000), politician Arvind Kejriwal (2006), environmentalist Sonam Wangchuk (2018), journalist Ravish Kumar (2019), and oncologist Padma Shri Dr. R. Ravi Kannan in 2023.

Ramon Magsaysay Award

• This award was established in 1957–58. It is given in memory of the seventh President of the Philippines, Ramon Magsaysay. It is also called the Nobel Prize of Asia.
• From 1958 to 2008, this award was given in six categories: Government Service, Public Service, Community Leadership, Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts, Peace and International Understanding, and Emergent Leadership (for individuals under 40 years of age).
• Since 2009, the award has not been given in any fixed category, except for Emergent Leadership, which continues in collaboration with the Ford Foundation.