From aspiring to become a lawyer to leading Girl Rising’s work globally and in India, Nidhi Shukla is working to ensure girls have the confidence, skills, and opportunities to shape their own futures.
Growing up in Kanpur as the eldest of three siblings, Nidhi Shukla was raised with strong values around education, hard work, and integrity. She wanted to become a lawyer because she was drawn to the idea of standing up for people whose voices often went unheard. Today, as Co-CEO of Girl Rising, she works to create a future where girls are educated, respected, and heard.
Speaking about her journey, Nidhi reflected on how her own experiences, along with years of working with girls, teachers, and communities, shaped her understanding of agency and social change.
From A Shy Child To An Advocate For Voice
Nidhi describes herself as a shy child who rarely spoke up for herself. Yet, she was fascinated by the idea of using law to stand up for people whose voices were often ignored.
Convincing her family to allow her to move to another city to study law became one of her earliest lessons in negotiating for her own aspirations. She later moved into the development sector, where her work across public health, human rights, gender equality, and education brought her face-to-face with girls and women whose experiences resonated with her.
Over time, she came to believe that one of the biggest barriers facing girls is not a lack of talent or ambition, but a lack of agency, confidence, support, and opportunities to make choices about their own lives.
A Career Shaped By Advocacy And Experience
Nidhi’s first job became an important turning point in her professional life. At Lawyers Collective, she was trusted with meaningful work early in her career, helping build her confidence.
One defining moment came when she wrote an abstract on a landmark Bombay High Court judgment that upheld the right of a person living with HIV to continue working. The abstract earned her a full scholarship to attend the International AIDS Conference in Durban, where she presented her work before an international audience.
The experience strengthened her belief in the power of policy, advocacy, and communication to drive social change. Over the following two decades, her work expanded across public health, gender equality, education, and strategic communications, involving collaboration with governments, civil society organisations, and communities across Asia and Africa.
Making Girls Active Participants
At Girl Rising, the organisation works towards a future where all girls are educated, respected, and heard.
Its programmes focus on helping adolescents, particularly girls, develop life skills including self-confidence, resilience, negotiation, and other 21st-century skills.
As Co-CEO, Nidhi’s responsibility involves ensuring that these programmes continue to evolve with changing needs. Her work includes strengthening existing programmes, analysing what works on the ground, exploring opportunities to scale, and mobilising resources.
She says the organisation’s approach is rooted in ensuring that adolescents are encouraged to lead actively rather than participate passively.
Why Changing Gender Norms Takes Time
For Nidhi, one of the biggest challenges in this work is that changing behaviour is far more complex than addressing an information gap.
Encouraging girls to stay in school and develop skills that may traditionally have been considered unnecessary for them means challenging years of social conditioning.
She points out that behaviour learned over 16 or 17 years cannot be unlearned through a single programme cycle. Yet organisations working in the social sector are often expected to demonstrate quick and measurable outcomes.
Funding can also favour visible, immediate results over long-term systems strengthening. For Nidhi, this creates a constant tension between the time meaningful change requires and the expectations placed on organisations to demonstrate impact.
When Change Begins With A Small Moment
Some of the moments that Nidhi considers most meaningful are not necessarily the ones that produce the biggest numbers.
She recalls a teacher who said Girl Rising’s training made her more conscious of how she taught, encouraging her to create a classroom where students could speak freely about what they wanted to become.
She also remembers a boy who initially did not take the programme seriously but later changed his understanding of gender equality. Another example is a girl from Bilaspur who participated in a RISE session and began questioning why girls were expected to cook and clean while boys were encouraged to dream bigger.
According to Nidhi, Girl Rising has reached 66 lakh learners through its digital curriculum and more than 600,000 adolescents through its RISE programme in government schools over the last decade.
Building Pathways Beyond The Classroom
Nidhi believes the next phase of work must connect adolescents with the opportunities that already exist, including scholarships, vocational training, mentorship, and career pathways.
She also wants storytelling to play a greater role in helping young people develop the confidence to express who they are, what they believe, and what they aspire to become.
Looking ahead, she hopes the sector moves away from short funding cycles and towards longer-term investment in systems strengthening. She also advocates for greater collaboration between organisations so that knowledge, networks, and learnings can be shared rather than developed in isolation.
The Logical Indian Perspective
Nidhi Shukla’s journey highlights why educating girls must go beyond access to classrooms. Education can provide knowledge, but agency gives young people the confidence to question expectations, make choices, and imagine futures on their own terms.
Through her work with Girl Rising, Nidhi is advocating for a model of education that places voice, confidence, life skills, and gender equality alongside academic learning. Her story is a reminder that meaningful social change may take time, but it often begins with something as simple and powerful as a girl finding the confidence to speak up.
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