<p>“Maafi, Maafi, Maafi.” This was not someone pleading ‘sorry’ for a wrong done. These were the names screaming from a list of ‘out-of-school girls’ in Ghatol block in Rajasthan’s tribal dominated Banswara district. </p>.<p>“As I read, my eyes moved from village to village, household number to household number, but the girls’ names remained the same. Maafi. Line after line. Maafi, Maafi, Maafi. I just kept on scrolling, clenching the computer mouse in my hand, until the spreadsheet went empty again. I let out a sigh, and the repetition stopped, but my eyes welled up, my vision of spreadsheet got distorted and the tears began,” pens Safeena Husain, author of ‘Every Last Girl’ and founder of ‘Educate Girls’ a NGO founded in 2007, working at the grassroots, and dedicated to girls’ education in rural and marginalised communities. Her work has helped bring back two million girls into the classroom. Her organisation won the 2025 Ramon Magsaysay award. </p>.<p>Not just Maafi, names like Faltu (Useless), Maanbhaari (Heavy Heart), Dhaapu (Fed-Up), Antimbala (Last one) abound, and Safeena writes that these names exemplify girls as less, undeserving and expendable and reveal a mindset that denies them an education, makes them work at home and outside and ultimately ends in marriage and early motherhood. </p>.<p>It is against this bleak scenario of parents being frustrated and disappointed over having an unwanted girl and hoping that she would be the last one (antimbala) that Safeena found rays of hope, too. </p>.<p>In her book, she talks about Nagina Bano from Falna, who stood up in a meeting mostly composed of men, and spoke about the importance of education, when she said, “My education is the only thing that is truly mine. No one can beat it out of me. No one can steal it from me. No flood, no famine can take it away; my education will be with me till my dying day.” She writes that meeting Nagina was a turning point in her life, helping her to understand that education is a human right, which firmed up her resolve to educate the ‘last-mile’ girl. Safeena takes us through other incredible stories of many such girls like Vibha, Ganaki, Andu and Anisha Kumari, whose father, despite being a smallholder farmer, was also an outlier, who did his best to support his daughter. </p><p>Composed around the clarion call to not leave any girl behind, the book also dwells on her traumatic childhood and how it acted as a trigger for her to embark on this ambitious and extremely difficult mission. Her childhood was spent around hardship, poverty, violence and abuse, which interrupted her education for three years until her aunt rescued her and provided her stability. Her renewed education trajectory changed her life course, and she ended up at the London School of Economics, becoming the first in her family to do so. She started working in San Francisco at a software startup in 1995, but later quit to join a health nonprofit. </p>.<p>Distressed over the entrenched idea that a girl’s worth is lesser than a boy’s, the author says that she understood that the biggest challenge was changing the mindset. Although she knew that the solution had to be human, she had to learn the hard way how to achieve this seemingly impossible task. Safeena details how she realised the power of storytelling in changing mindsets and how she failed initially while her local volunteers built relationships, invested time, listened, earned trust and did not just approach it as a transactional exercise. She weaves in many anecdotes about how she learnt valuable lessons, especially the role of local role models and influencers in driving a mindset. </p>.<p>The author also dwells upon the problem of not finding the last girl despite back-breaking survey work conducted by her organisation to track down out-of-school girls in Pali and Jalore districts of Rajasthan. There remained many hotspots where girls did not go to school, and those places remained out of the government records or their survey. And how AI helped to track these unknown girls, as it could predict the villages where they were likely to find more invisible and forgotten girls. Every Last Girl is a moving portrait of the author’s outward search and inward journey of finding dignity for every last girl. She writes, “In this book, I would like to rewrite the story of the girls I have met and for those I haven’t.” </p>
<p>“Maafi, Maafi, Maafi.” This was not someone pleading ‘sorry’ for a wrong done. These were the names screaming from a list of ‘out-of-school girls’ in Ghatol block in Rajasthan’s tribal dominated Banswara district. </p>.<p>“As I read, my eyes moved from village to village, household number to household number, but the girls’ names remained the same. Maafi. Line after line. Maafi, Maafi, Maafi. I just kept on scrolling, clenching the computer mouse in my hand, until the spreadsheet went empty again. I let out a sigh, and the repetition stopped, but my eyes welled up, my vision of spreadsheet got distorted and the tears began,” pens Safeena Husain, author of ‘Every Last Girl’ and founder of ‘Educate Girls’ a NGO founded in 2007, working at the grassroots, and dedicated to girls’ education in rural and marginalised communities. Her work has helped bring back two million girls into the classroom. Her organisation won the 2025 Ramon Magsaysay award. </p>.<p>Not just Maafi, names like Faltu (Useless), Maanbhaari (Heavy Heart), Dhaapu (Fed-Up), Antimbala (Last one) abound, and Safeena writes that these names exemplify girls as less, undeserving and expendable and reveal a mindset that denies them an education, makes them work at home and outside and ultimately ends in marriage and early motherhood. </p>.<p>It is against this bleak scenario of parents being frustrated and disappointed over having an unwanted girl and hoping that she would be the last one (antimbala) that Safeena found rays of hope, too. </p>.<p>In her book, she talks about Nagina Bano from Falna, who stood up in a meeting mostly composed of men, and spoke about the importance of education, when she said, “My education is the only thing that is truly mine. No one can beat it out of me. No one can steal it from me. No flood, no famine can take it away; my education will be with me till my dying day.” She writes that meeting Nagina was a turning point in her life, helping her to understand that education is a human right, which firmed up her resolve to educate the ‘last-mile’ girl. Safeena takes us through other incredible stories of many such girls like Vibha, Ganaki, Andu and Anisha Kumari, whose father, despite being a smallholder farmer, was also an outlier, who did his best to support his daughter. </p><p>Composed around the clarion call to not leave any girl behind, the book also dwells on her traumatic childhood and how it acted as a trigger for her to embark on this ambitious and extremely difficult mission. Her childhood was spent around hardship, poverty, violence and abuse, which interrupted her education for three years until her aunt rescued her and provided her stability. Her renewed education trajectory changed her life course, and she ended up at the London School of Economics, becoming the first in her family to do so. She started working in San Francisco at a software startup in 1995, but later quit to join a health nonprofit. </p>.<p>Distressed over the entrenched idea that a girl’s worth is lesser than a boy’s, the author says that she understood that the biggest challenge was changing the mindset. Although she knew that the solution had to be human, she had to learn the hard way how to achieve this seemingly impossible task. Safeena details how she realised the power of storytelling in changing mindsets and how she failed initially while her local volunteers built relationships, invested time, listened, earned trust and did not just approach it as a transactional exercise. She weaves in many anecdotes about how she learnt valuable lessons, especially the role of local role models and influencers in driving a mindset. </p>.<p>The author also dwells upon the problem of not finding the last girl despite back-breaking survey work conducted by her organisation to track down out-of-school girls in Pali and Jalore districts of Rajasthan. There remained many hotspots where girls did not go to school, and those places remained out of the government records or their survey. And how AI helped to track these unknown girls, as it could predict the villages where they were likely to find more invisible and forgotten girls. Every Last Girl is a moving portrait of the author’s outward search and inward journey of finding dignity for every last girl. She writes, “In this book, I would like to rewrite the story of the girls I have met and for those I haven’t.” </p>