In Jamui, Bihar, around 2016-17, a younger brother stopped his elder sister from leaving the village to write an entrance test. She could not go. Ravi Dhanuka, Co-Founder and Director of i-Saksham Education and Learning Foundation, recalls the moment with clarity. It was not an unusual story in rural Bihar. That was precisely what made it so striking.
For Dhanuka and his co-founders, Aditya Tyagi, Shravan Kumar Jha, and Ranita Uppal, this incident exposed the patriarchal challenges faced by countless young women in marginalized communities. Denied opportunities to pursue their aspirations, many are compelled to lead conventional lives of unacknowledged identities and unexplored potential.
i-Saksham, which means “I am capable,” is a non-profit founded in 2015, working in the 5 districts of Bihar- Munger, Jamui, Gaya, Begusarai, and Muzaffarpur to build young rural women as community change leaders, known as “Edu-Leaders,” through a two-year fellowship programme. Its vision is the voice and choice for every woman. Aditya, Shravan, and Ravi had served as Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellows before coming together to build this organisation, and the years they spent in the most remote corners of rural Bihar laid the foundation for everything i-Saksham has since become.
From Fellows to Founders
The origins of i-Saksham are, as Dhanuka describes them, organic. During their time as Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellows, he and his co-founders built strong connections with local rural youth, especially girls. They taught them, linked them to skills development initiatives, and organised job fairs so that they could access better higher education and employment opportunities. In return, they encouraged these young people to help each other and support others. By 2013, this effort had a name: i-Saksham.
In conversation with The Logical Indian, Dhanuka describes what the fellowship years revealed: “The fellowship exposed us to the most backward, remote pockets of rural Bihar where civil society organizations were too little, government had yet to do a lot, and market mechanisms were too weak. We experienced that local youths were the most under-leveraged assets of the community. They had their learning needs but also the immense potential to contribute to social change.”
It was after the Jamui incident in 2016-17 that the team decided to centre their work on building young women change leaders who would challenge the system from within by demonstrating capability and earning trust.
Centering Women’s Leadership
For i-Saksham, meaningful agency looks specific and grounded. “That they are able to share how they are feeling, that they feel confident to stand up against social issues, that they feel capable to solve their personal challenges and support others,” says Dhanuka.
The organisation chose a fellowship model over a conventional NGO programme structure because of a belief all four co-founders hold firmly. “We always believed that change leaders (called ‘Edu-Leaders’) are assets for their communities, not project staff of an NGO,” Dhanuka explains. The fellowship develops this human capital through a peer-led approach, and at least ten percent of participants go on to become mentors for the next cohort, creating a sustainable leadership pipeline.
Selection and the Journey of an Edu-Leader
The selection process begins with door-to-door village campaigns to identify high-potential young girls who have at least passed Class 12. The team pitches the programme design, shares the potential change it can bring to their lives, explains how they can influence their community, and seeks their commitment. Interested candidates undergo a written assessment and behaviour interview, followed by a family counselling session.
Once inside the programme, Edu-Leaders start their journey by realising the power of developing and clearly articulating their aspirations. Questioning how gender and identity shapes their participation is the first step. Gradually, they start framing SMART goals around their education, career roles, and relationships within the family.
The decisions that follow are not small ones. Dhanuka and his co-founders have seen Edu-Leaders convince their families to delay marriage, to let them take jobs outside districts, and to independently move around in their villages. Newly married Edu-Leaders have convinced their in-laws and returned to work within a few weeks.
However, Dhanuka is careful to note what remains out of reach. “Though we see expansion in decision making spaces related to education, work and community engagement, the spheres of personal relationships, household roles still remain restricted.”
Bringing Families In
The early resistance the organisation encountered was largely about mobility. Families were not comfortable letting their daughters roam around the villages and visit different households. One husband, Dhanuka recalls, used to lock his wife inside whenever he went outside.
Even after the fellowship, many fellows struggle to benefit from economic opportunities outside their immediate district because of this.
Rather than working around families, the organisation works with them. The selection process requires mandatory family counselling and consent. Parents are engaged through one-to-one home visits and monthly mother’s group meetings. The team shares what girls are learning in the programme and invites their reflections. They also encourage parents to deep dive into their own suppressed aspirations — what they wanted to be when they were eighteen, how they would like to support their daughters, and how to create a more equitable parenting atmosphere at home.
The induction itself includes an orientation session for parents, and the organisation periodically hosts community events to showcase Edu-Leaders’ successes.
Fellows, too, had their own questions in the early years. Some asked whether they were not better off preparing for government jobs. What drew others in was the promise of public visibility the opportunity to break shackles and interact with a wide number of stakeholders.
Over time, trust has deepened. As parents observe Edu-Leaders model new behaviours consistently and daughters grow more confident and demonstrate responsibility, families develop new reference points for what educated young women can do. Their expectations begin to shift.
“In villages, where we struggled to find 2 fellows 3-5 years back, we now receive 10X applications for each fellow’s selection,” says Dhanuka.
Classroom and Community
Beyond the fellowship, i-Saksham’s work is also evolving towards creating adolescent peer groups and safe spaces within the community. In schools, the organisation’s objective is to demonstrate adolescent-friendly facilitation that exhibits care and power sharing in government schools.
What Change Looks Like on the Ground
Dhanuka and his co-founders have witnessed the full range of outcomes that community-led change can produce. On one side, they have seen married women being escorted to training locations by their in-laws, and the household role shifting to accommodate a girl’s engagement. On the other, they have seen families turning their backs despite witnessing the girl’s high potential. The girls have secured admission to prestigious institutes but could not get the monetary support from the families.
While speaking to The Logical Indian, Dhanuka describes an approach to impact that does not rely primarily on quantifiable metrics. “We focus more on relationships and beliefs/mindsets,” he says. In Edu-Leaders, the team closely tracks the nature of aspirations they cultivate and the kind of goals they set and achieve. Over a period of time, the aim is that they cultivate confidence to take charge of their lives.
In adolescents, they analyse how they navigate family challenges and the kind of emotions they exhibit while dealing with resistance. The aim is to enable safe spaces for them so that they learn to exercise choice at an individual and collective level. In parents, the aim is to update their beliefs about a girl’s potential in general, and analyse how it manifests in the nature of support she receives.
Partnership with Government
Government systems play an important role in providing access to Edu-Leaders and giving them a platform to benefit their communities in collaboration. Under a partnership with JEEViKA, Edu-Leaders support federations of women self-help groups to run education and gender initiatives.
They further work to improve adolescent attendance in collaboration with the Department of Education, and run awareness campaigns against dowry and domestic violence in collaboration with the Women and Child Development Corporation.
The Hardest Decisions
The most difficult decision the co-founders have faced is how to position their model: from the relationships and agency perspective, or from the gains Edu-Leaders drive in areas like education or livelihoods. “The former is intangible but the soul of the work, the latter is tangible but more like a physical manifestation,” says Dhanuka. The team was initially sceptical whether their preferred positioning on leadership would drive collaborations with stakeholders. “But people have appreciated this much more than we anticipated,” he adds.
On financial sustainability, Dhanuka says the organisation looks forward to developing a diverse pool of funders among retail donors, corporate CSRs, and domestic and foreign foundations.
Alumni, WAYAM, and What Sustains Change
Alumni are, as Dhanuka puts it, a key lever to sustain and expand the impact. They model new behaviours — travelling independently, dressing as per their choice, negotiating freedom. By achieving success in higher education and employment, they demonstrate what women can achieve if supported. They collaborate with local civil society organisations and government and act as last mile responder to critical social issues. They mentor newer cohorts and build more leaders like them.
Sustaining that identity after the fellowship ends is one of the hardest areas in work of this kind. Since 2022, i-Saksham has been facilitating a sustained peer-led support system called WAYAM for i-Saksham Edu-Leader Fellowship alumni so that they help each other enhance their wellbeing across different life situations and sustain their identity as change-makers. WAYAM provides safe spaces in a cluster format to share one another’s lived experiences and be supported to navigate stress and anxiety. Through collective meaning-making, they act on shared change-making agendas that transform access, safety and dignity for girls and women in their local communities. This could take the form of peer crisis support when a member faces family pressure, strengthening the adolescents’ mentoring, or running community campaigns that build on their credibility.
Vidushi: Scaling the Coaching Experience
The organisation’s newest initiative, Vidushi, is a coaching bot developed to scale this same coaching experience. The insight behind it is that to truly take charge of their lives, women need safe spaces where they can reflect on their challenges and they need push to realise that they have the solution. “By arriving at their own solutions, they gain the sense of power,” says Dhanuka. i-Saksham will soon be piloting Vidushi to assess the extent to which it can drive gains in young women’s sense of confidence and clarity to pursue their goals.
On Scale and Depth
Dhanuka is clear that depth and scale are not in tension at i-Saksham. “To us, depth is a scale,” he says. By building leadership density that demonstrates women in new roles, the organisation changes community expectations through role modelling and network effects which in turn reduce resistance for millions of girls in their respective communities.
“Our scale will be hollow without this depth of transformation that our Edu-Leaders experience and drive.”
The goal, he says, is to build a network of 10,000 change leaders who collectively influence a million girls. The aim is to create a community-rooted model of building leadership, which multiplies on its own through a peer-led approach.
What They Have Learnt
The work has challenged many of the co-founders’ own assumptions. They expected families to be more resistant and controlling than they found. “Overall, we have found families to be much more supportive than we expected. The imagination that people are too restrictive and just want to control is not true. In many cases, families want to support their children. They just need to trust their children’s abilities to take care of themselves and they need examples, reference points to challenge the community norms,” says Dhanuka.
The biggest learning about building an organisation in the social sector is one he articulates with care: “That relationship is often an understated lever of change. The development work is so much about transforming unequal relationships, but many times, we just keep scratching the surface without altering the power dynamics and mindsets that gave birth to the problem in the first place.”
And what he and his co-founders would say to others wanting to build long-term, community-led change: “Long term community-led change requires rooted anchors and systems. Until we find and nurture them from within the community, our change will always be short-lived.” And all systems change work, Dhanuka adds, not just leveraging government as a channel. Transforming families and relationships within the community and how they engage with formal and informal institutions are the root fulcrums, more often than not, that requires shifting.
For Ravi Dhanuka, Aditya Tyagi, Shravan Kumar Jha, and Ranita Uppal, the work of i-Saksham is, at its core, the work of changing those dynamics — one Edu-Leader, one family, one village at a time.
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
At The Logical Indian, we believe that change rarely announces itself loudly. It lives in the quiet decisions — a young woman who convinces her family to let her take a job in another district, a mother who begins to imagine a different future for her daughter, a community that slowly builds a new idea of what is possible. The story of i-Saksham and its founders is precisely this kind of change.
If you’d like us to feature your story, please write to us at csr@5w1h.media
