How Educate Girls scales for greater impact using SurveyCTO
Meet Educate Girls
Educate Girls is an Indian non-profit driving large-scale change in girls’ education across rural and educationally marginalized communities. Established in 2007, the organization works in close partnership with government systems to strengthen access, retention, and learning outcomes in line with national education priorities. Operating across multiple states and thousands of villages, Educate Girls focuses on reintegrating out-of-school girls, improving foundational learning, and enabling second-chance education pathways. The organization’s long-term goal is to improve access to quality education for 10 million learners cumulatively by 2035.
Headquarters: India
Sector: Education
Use case: Monitoring quality of education programs, enrolling new students into programs, detecting gaps in the implementation process
Features used: Data monitoring, form design, GPS and multimedia data collection, backchecks, concurrent monitoring
The Goal: Improving the access and quality of education for 10 million learners
Across rural India, millions of girls remain excluded not because education is unavailable, but because access is uneven and shaped by poverty, social norms, migration, and household responsibilities. When schooling is interrupted, girls are often the first to leave and the least likely to return. The consequence is not only individual loss, but a generational cycle of reduced economic opportunity, lower agency, and diminished community resilience. Scale compounds the challenge—reaching the last mile requires systems that can identify, re-engage, and sustain learning for those most at risk of falling through the cracks.
Bridging this gap cannot rely on parallel service delivery alone. The real opportunity lies in strengthening public education systems while mobilizing communities to act as partners in change. Educate Girls was founded on this belief: that sustainable impact happens when government infrastructure and community ownership work together—combining reach with accountability, and scale with quality.
The Vidya program embodies this systems-first approach at the foundational level. Focused on girls aged 6-14 years, the program works to reintegrate out-of-school girls into formal schooling while strengthening foundational literacy, numeracy for all children, and life skills for girls in government schools. Through community engagement and school-based interventions, Vidya addresses both enrollment and learning—ensuring that access translates into meaningful educational progress rather than mere attendance.
Yet for many young women, the barrier is not entry into school—it is re-entry after years of interruption. The Pragati program responds to this second-chance need. Designed for young women aged 15-29, the program provides a structured pathway to complete Grade 10 education through village-based learning camps via government open schools. Beyond academic preparation, Pragati builds confidence, communication skills, and 21st century skills like digital and financial literacy—recognizing that education at this stage is not only about certification, but about restoring opportunity, agency, and economic participation.
The solution: Embedding SurveyCTO into a robust Performance Management System for real-time field data collection, QA workflows, and operational reporting
Scale introduces a different kind of challenge. Reaching thousands of villages means working in environments where migration, attendance patterns, and local conditions shift constantly. Without timely visibility, even well-designed programs risk losing precision as they grow. The question is not only how to collect data, but how to ensure that field realities consistently inform decisions.
Educate Girls addressed this by embedding digital data systems into the core of program delivery. Since 2018, SurveyCTO has become a foundational layer within the organization’s Performance Management System—enabling high-frequency, verified data flow from the last mile into leadership dashboards. Household surveys, enrollment verification, learner feedback, and backchecks are captured with built-in metadata such as GPS and timestamps, ensuring both speed and reliability.
The result is a system where field signals become operational intelligence—supporting faster decisions, stronger accountability, and quality that holds even as scale expands.
When data flows reliably from the field into decision systems, it shifts programs from reactive to responsive. For Educate Girls, this means identifying out-of-school girls faster, validating enrollment progress, and detecting implementation gaps before they widen. Data is no longer retrospective—it becomes a tool for timely course correction.
As such, Educate Girls built a custom integration between their performance management system (PMS) and SurveyCTO so that collected data from the SurveyCTO Collect mobile app instantly flows into downstream web-based platforms for approvals, monitoring, and reporting.
Several functionalities made SurveyCTO the tool of choice for this important data work:
- Advanced form logic allows complex household listing and verification workflows to be deployed consistently across geographies
- Rich metadata capture—GPS coordinates, timestamps, photos, and device audit trails—adds a verification layer beyond self-reported data
- Enumerator performance analytics (interview duration, submission timing, coverage ratios) support supervisory oversight
- Offline data collection with secure syncing enables reliability in low-connectivity environments
- Interoperability through integrations supports automated data transfer into internal systems for cleaning, validation, and analytics
Within the PMS environment, data undergoes structured ETL processing, where inconsistencies are flagged and performance signals are generated. Insights are then pushed back to field teams through review mechanisms and follow-up actions—creating a continuous feedback loop rather than a one-direction reporting chain.
Through this architecture, SurveyCTO serves as the field data acquisition and verification layer, while internal systems convert structured inputs into actionable intelligence—allowing Educate Girls to sustain precision, accountability, and quality as programs scale.
The results
In the last eight years, Educate Girls has used SurveyCTO to collect over five million data points to help scale and monitor their programs, keeping them on track for success. They also used SurveyCTO to collect data to understand student feedback on the value and safety of the learning camps, and staff feedback on the timeliness of the curriculum and the level of support they receive from managers.
This operational discipline has powered impact at a scale few organizations achieve. Educate Girls has mobilized over 2 million girls for school enrollment and supported more than 4 million children in learning across 30,000+ villages—demonstrating that scale and quality can advance together when systems support accountability.
The organization has also shaped the global evidence agenda for education. Educate Girls was a key partner in the world’s first Development Impact Bond (DIB) in education, which exceeded its targets and proved that learning and enrollment outcomes can be independently verified and linked to performance-based financing. Its leadership in scaling evidence-backed solutions has earned international distinction, including being named Asia’s first TED Audacious Project in education and receiving the Ramon Magsaysay Award, one of Asia’s most prestigious recognitions for transformative social impact.
