A management professional turned education enthusiast, Khushboo Awasthi is the Chief Operating Officer of SHIKSHALOKAM with 12+ years of diverse experience in the education and healthcare domain across product development, project management, program design, community engagement, and technology. In the past decade, she has built two organizations (SHIKSHALOKAM and MANTRA4CHANGE) both focused on education system leadership development towards enabling enriching learning experiences for children. Through several programs co-created with the public education department across 10 Indian states, Khushboo has catalyzed the learning journeys of 540,000+ school leaders to enhance the teaching-learning outcomes in 300,000 schools. She is also on the National Working Committee of the National Mentoring Mission by the Ministry of Education which is being operationalized by the National Council for Teacher Education and has conducted several consultative workshops for education leaders toward enabling mentoring and thus, improving learning experiences for students, teachers, and school leaders.

A believer in Systems and Platform Thinking, Khushboo is a travel enthusiast, a curious learner, and an avid reader. Her interests lie in exploring concepts of agency, networks, largescale social movements, and the societal role of technology in encouraging co-creation and collaboration. Let’s hear it from her.

Tell us about the idea behind establishing MANTRA4CHANGE and later co-founding SHIKSHALOKAM?

It was in 2013 that an intense entrepreneurial journey toward solving India’s education inequity challenge began. I cofounded MANTRA4CHANGE with a vision to transform public education in India. Our answer to one of the most critical challenges in education has been - developing leaders and leadership in the education system. The idea of the development of educational leadership that inspired us to initiate our work in Karnataka with three schools in 2014, has now become a game changer for many education leaders and schools across several states in India. The experiences and learnings at Mantra eventually led to co-founding the SHIKSHALOKAM initiative in 2017.

Introduce us toSHIKSHALOKAM. Tell us about the various responsibilities you shoulder as the COO.

For our children to get access to quality education as a fundamental right, public schools in our country have to improve; and for schools to improve, the school leaders have to own and lead the process of improvement. In the Indian education ecosystem, discussions on the role of leadership and education leaders are often missing. As a result of which education leaders have few development opportunities. Hence, SHIKSHALOKAM was founded with the mission to enable and amplify leadership development opportunities for education leaders across the 1.5 million schools in India. We define leadership as one’s ability to continuously improve their context. Imagine if every school head across our 1.5 million schools leads one micro-improvement every month, our education system will see 18 million improvements every year. This is the goal that we are working towards.

As the Chief Operating Officer, my role is to lead strategic ecosystem initiatives and manage the implementation of programs, lead the development of national digital infrastructure and identify synergies to continuously co-create with government & NGO partners to solve the education leadership challenges in the country at scale, with scale and sustainably.

"My success mantra is to be a lifelong learner. When i learn, i never cease to grow, and this makes me a happy person"

Throw some light on the most critical challenges you face as a business leader. What steps do you take to overcome them? What is your success mantra?

Shared meaning-making with government actors can take a lot of time because of diverse perspectives and priorities. To address this, we constantly undertake capacity enhancement of the team, review our processes for effectiveness and efficiency, and have built reflection mechanisms across levels. Secondly, it is also challenging to build a sense of purpose and team spirit in a hybrid & remote work environment where I have observed that trust is an outcome of frequent authentic interactions. Furthermore, I have realized that in the development sector, it is important to engage the ecosystem to continuously co-create and collaborate to be able to solve the issues at scale and sustainably. Hence, we host continuous dialogues with key actors and influencers around the importance of leadership in the education system and societal thinking values.

My success mantra is to be a lifelong learner. When I learn, I never cease to grow, and this makes me a happy person.

What is your vision for SHIKSHALOKAM’S next growth phase?

In the first five years, we have gotten the idea of leadership and micro-improvements into the national programs and created a technology backbone that can enable micro-improvements at scale. The next five years should be about making micro-improvements a habit and witnessing the significant impact of leadership practices on student outcomes. My vision is to transform our mission into a movement.

What would be your advice to young women who aspire to become business leaders in the future?

Being a woman, you'd often find yourself breaking patriarchal norms and standards set by society, hence be courageous and learn to believe in yourself & your dreams. Along the way find a mentor who can help you brainstorm and a partner to share your vision. And most importantly, don't be afraid of making mistakes but be smart enough to not repeat them.

Khushboo Awasthi, COO, Shikshalokam

Having a B.E. in BioMedical Instrumentation Engineering, and a Master’s in Hospital Administration, Hospital and Healthcare Management, Khushboo is addressing the gaps in the education leadership development space by restoring the agency of the leaders through national and state level education change programs.

Headquarters: Bengaluru

Awards & Recognition:

● Awarded Women Transforming India recognition by NITI-Aayog

● Received WIPRO’s seed fellowship grant

● She was a part of NSRCEL-IIM-Bengaluru incubator and NCore Accelerator Program

● Included in the Business World Education 40 Under 40 Power List 2022