Although the Right to Education Act of 2009 guarantees free education to all Indian children through age 14, many students slip through the cracks, drop out at or before 14, and/or receive insufficient instruction in over-stretched classrooms of schools with tight budgets and few resources. Economic barriers sometimes compel desperate families to send their children to work—many kids don’t make it to school, and the ones who do may be in a classroom with no electricity, an unmanageable student to teacher ratio, or unsafe facilities.

The repercussions of inadequate access to and quality of education particularly affect Indian girls and their learning trajectories.Only 27% of Indian women receive any secondary education. Sexual harassment and violence in schools can make young women fearful for their safety and dignity; lack of sanitary washrooms for pubescent girls often means staying at home and missing class during menstruation; and in some cases, son preference motivates families to prioritise male children’s education, which may be at the expense of daughters’ schooling. Economic disenfranchisement, lack of healthcare access, gender-based stigma, early marriage, and caste marginalisation further preclude girls’ attendance in school, creating a formidable gap between the educational advancement of men and women in India. Just 65% of Indian women are literate, compared to 82% of men.

Development conversations have foregrounded women’s empowerment and girl’s education in recent years, prompting many groups in India to tackle the education systems’ gender-based disparities. Much of this work involves awareness raising about the importance of girls’ education, offering resources for schools and teachers, enrolling girls in school from a young age, and endowing communities with support to ensure the girls’ continued enrollment. We gratefully ally ourselves with these missions—to confront the huge issues in education, we must approach from many angles. It’s incredible that within a few years, the terrain of girls’ education—in India and around the world—has so rapidly expanded, giving thousands of overlooked young girls a chance to learn.

But what about the older girls–at the brink of adulthood and past the standard age to begin schooling?

At iSaahasi Academy, we focus on this older population—young women who, for whatever reason, endured a break in their education. We aim to offer a place of dignity for women to return to education and to foster a strong, empowered community that encourages students to pursue their intellectual passions. Though our Academy is small now, we are taking our time to do things right. Our students deserve a safe, steady, and world-class school. So, we offer our students state-of-the-art facilities in which we conduct a broad spectrum of classes—ranging from Math and English to financial planning and personal healthcare—to put our students on track for educational advancement and economic empowerment. Our highly trained staff gauges the individual placement of each students’ educational background in order to create lessons plans tailored to the specific needs of each student. Our curriculum, malleable to the individual experience of each student, follows international standards, vesting our participants with the same preparedness as their peers in academies across India and the world.

Every day, we conclude class with a reflection circle. We share our personal challenges and successes with the lessons from the day, in order to encourage each other and understand that, at iSaahasi, we do not struggle alone. At the end of reflection, we put our hands in the middle of the circle and yell, “WE CAN!” thrusting our hands skyward and devolving into a gaggle of gigglers. Chortles and cheesiness aside, this moment showcases our team’s chummy tenacity. Together, we can all go back to school.