Ananya Tiwari is passionate about girls’ education.

At the age of 34, she has already supported thousands of girl students and teachers in the poorest and most remote parts of her native India. Ananya obtained a PhD in Educational Psychology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2023, where she was the recipient of the outstanding doctoral medallion. Sense of belonging and intrinsic motivation is the focus of her research and a concept that she has introduced to hundreds of teachers in India’s government-owned schools.

Ananya was awarded a MMEG grant in 2022 to support completion of her graduate studies, which was enabled by multiple scholarships. Most girls in India are less fortunate. Affordable quality secondary education is out of reach for millions of girls in India and dropout rates are high. An unfortunate result is millions of child-age brides. Ananya is helping break this cycle by improving the quality of education the government provides to the poorest of the poor via residential schools for minority girls, known as Kasturba Gandhi Balikpapan Vidylaya or KGBVs.

Ananya co-founded SwaTaleem, an educational startup that helps teachers in clusters of 4–5 KGBVs address pedagogical challenges using intrinsic motivation and social emotional learning while reinforcing the government curriculum. She launched SwaTaleem in Haryana, an Indian state with one of the lowest educational achievement levels and literacy rates for girls. SwaTaleem now works with 31 KGBVs, reaching over 5,000 underrepresented girls.

SwaTaleem uses basic technology to motivate and track students’ daily progress. For example, each student receives a weekly text (coupled with daily in-person sessions) with a learning-based task. Students and their parents are prompted via text to track the completion of those assignments. The assignments reinforce what is being studied in school, and the tracking provides data on how best to change the design of the program before expanding.

Increasing government support of SwaTaleem and improved test scores attest to the effectiveness of SwaTaleem, as does the securing of a long-term Google Impact Challenge for Women and Girls grant. In 2022, Google named Ananya one of seven rising changemakers as a Leader to Watch.

Ananya plans to eventually expand SwaTaleem’s innovative educational services to all Indian states with KGBVs and keep hundreds of thousands of girls enrolled in school, motivated, and learning.

SwaTaleem won in 2023 a Nature Award for Inspiring Women in Science, in partnership with The Estée Lauder Companies.

This prize recognized their work encouraging historically underrepresented girls in New Delhi, India, to study natural sciences and increase their retention in STEM areas.