Hindustan Times (Lucknow) - Hindustan Times (Lucknow) - Live
Sahni bags Social Entrepreneur of the Year award
Urvashi Sahni, founder and chief executive of Study Hall Educational Foundation (SHEF), was awarded the Social Entrepreneur of the Year award 2017 for her work in educating India’s most disadvantaged girls.
She won the award, beating candidates from more prominent non-profit organizations including Akshaya Patra. Commerce and industry minister Suresh Prabhu presented the award to Sahni on Wednesday.
Jointly founded by Jubilant Bhartia Foundation and Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship in 2010, the award recognizes promising and high impact social entrepreneurs implementing practical and sustainable solutions.
Sahni was chosen from over 100 applicants. The other two finalists for the award were Safeena Husain of Educate Girls and Madhu Pandit Dasa of the Akshaya Patra Foundation.
SHEF has demonstrated a business model of education for inclusion, empowerment and leadership building for India’s most disadvantaged and girls at risk. It has scaled its model across 993 government schools of Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, training 24,000 teachers in the process and impacting 501,000 girls.
To ensure that women from ultra poor communities have the resources to keep their daughters in schools, Sahni has started Didi, a catering and tailoring venture that has captured the Lucknow market for corporate meals and has doubled the incomes of its women employees. Accepting the award, Sahni said the perfect tool for changing mindset is education. “Education should be broader, deeper and wider. Until then we cannot call ourselves a fully democratic country,” she added.
Sahni is an Ashoka Fellow, an honorary member of the Clinton Global Initiative and a non-resident fellow at the Centre for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution in the US.