2026 PRME Students Sustainability Award

FIIB Girl Up club is a passionate group of students dedicated to promoting gender equity and empowering women within our community and beyond. Inspired by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5 - Gender Equality, the club strives to spearhead activities that would lead to creating a supportive and inclusive environment where individuals can come together to address pressing issues surrounding gender inequality.

At FIIB Girl Up Club, we believe that responsible management education cannot be confined to classrooms; it must be lived, practised, and felt in the communities around us. Everything we did in 2025 was designed with that conviction at its core.

Our work directly advanced five SDGs:

• SDG 4 (Quality Education) -Through our UBA Digital Literacy programme, we took FIIB's management education into the villages of Ghitorni and SOS Village, training 350+ rural girls on tools and portals that opened doors to education and livelihood opportunities they had been structurally excluded from.

• SDG 5 (Gender Equality) - This is the heartbeat of everything FIIB Girl Up does. From challenging binary stereotypes in corporate spaces through "Say It With Pride" to closing the digital gender divide in rural Delhi, every initiative we ran in 2025 was rooted in the belief that gender equity is not a goal for tomorrow; it is a responsibility for today.

• SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) - We equipped rural girls with resume-building skills and job portal access, and sparked conversations at FIIB about what truly inclusive workplaces look like for

LGBTQIA+ professionals.

• SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) - Whether addressing caste-blind corporate diversity policies, rural digital exclusion, or disability access in public spaces, FIIB Girl Up consistently worked at the intersection of gender and broader structural inequality.

• SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) - Our Walkathon for Accessibility brought 400+ people into public spaces to advocate for a barrier-free Delhi, a city where disability does not determine access.

On the Seven PRME Principles, FIIB Girl Up's work reflects a deep, lived alignment:

• Purpose - We don't treat social impact as an add-on to management education at FIIB. Our initiatives are designed so that students learn through purpose-driven action, not alongside it.

• Values - From facilitating conversations on transgender inclusion to marching publicly for disability rights, we ask our members to stand for values — not just study them.

• Method - Field immersions, social internships with Naz Foundation, and village training sessions are our classrooms. FIIB students who co-designed Hindi medium digital literacy curricula were applying human centred thinking in real time, under real constraints.

• Research - Our members documented field observations through structured reflection journals, connecting lived community experiences to course concepts in

sustainability, stakeholder management, and responsible business.

• Partnership - FIIB Girl Up does not work in isolation. In 2025 alone, we partnered with UN Girl Up, Naz Foundation, the Government of India's UBA programme, the Office of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities, IDEA, Taj Hotels, and IOCL, building the kind of cross-sector relationships that define responsible leadership.

• Dialogue - Every initiative we ran in 2025 was structured around listening as much as speaking, whether in a transgender inclusion workshop, a village training session, or a march through public streets.

FIIB Girl Up Club has always believed that the format of an initiative is as important as its message. In 2025, we deliberately chose formats that demanded participation, co creation, and genuine student ownership, not passive attendance.

For "Say It With Pride", we made a conscious choice to move away from the awareness panel format that dominates campus events. Instead, we built a sequential narrative dialogue, a storytelling-led experience where LGBTQIA+ advocates, corporate diversity practitioners, and experts from Naz Foundation shared lived realities in a structured, emotionally connected arc. Our students didn't just attend,

they curated the speakers, designed the event flow, and facilitated the discussion. The workshop on transgender inclusion engaged 150+ FIIB students not as an audience, but as active participants in a conversation they helped shape.

For our UBA Digital Literacy programme, the innovation was in the model itself. Rather than inviting an NGO to deliver training, FIIB Girl Up Club members became the trainers, designing a Hindi-medium curriculum with the girls themselves, teaching through peer-to-peer sessions that felt accessible rather than institutional. The "Teach One More" challenge, where every trained girl was asked to pass one skill to a family member before the next session, was our attempt to build a multiplier effect into the programme's DNA, extending reach organically beyond what 15 student trainers could achieve alone.

For the Walkathon for Accessibility, we asked ourselves: what does inclusion look like in public? The answer was a march. Not a seminar, not a panel, a 5 km walk through public spaces where 400+ people carried placards, made pledges and wore their commitment visibly. FIIB Girl Up turned advocacy into an embodied, civic act that moved beyond our campus walls and made inclusion visible to the wider Delhi community.

FIIB Girl Up Club has fundamentally shifted what responsible management education feels like on our campus. In 2025, we contributed to a cultural shift where inclusion, across gender, identity, and disability, is increasingly understood as a leadership competency, not a compliance checkbox. Students who organised "Say It With Pride" returned to their classrooms with a different understanding of what ethical leadership requires. Students who trained rural girls in Ghitorni came back to FIIB having experienced structural inequality at ground level, and that changes how you think about every business decision you will ever make. Students who organised the Walkathon now know what it takes to coordinate 400 people across sectors for a shared social goal. These are not soft skills, they are the defining competencies of responsible managers.

Institutionally, our work strengthens FIIB's identity as a PRME Signatory that walks its commitments. The initiatives

we ran in 2025 contribute directly to FIIB's SDG reporting and signal to accreditation bodies, recruiters, and the broader management education community that responsible leadership at FIIB begins in the field, not the boardroom.

In our local communities:

In the villages of Ghitorni and SOS Village, 350+ girls who had been excluded from the digital economy are now active users of it, accessing DigiLocker, job portals, and UPI payment apps independently. Village Panchayat leaders noted measurable increases in community awareness of digital government services. Families who were initially hesitant became advocates, recognising the economic and safety value of their daughters' new capabilities.

For the Divyangjan (PwDs) community in Delhi, the Walkathon created a high-visibility, multi-sector advocacy platform, bringing the voices of persons with disabilities into a public conversation that included FIIB students, government officials, and corporate representatives from Taj Hotels and IOCL. The presence of corporate sponsors sent a signal to the business community that accessibility is a genuine ESG priority, and that signal came, in part, from a student organisation at a management school in South Delhi.

FIIB Girl Up Club operates out of New Delhi, but we think and act as part of a global movement.

Our founding affiliation with UN Girl Up connects us to an international network of student-led chapters working on gender equality across vastly different cultural, economic, and institutional contexts. When we brought UN Girl Up into "Say It With Pride," we weren't just adding a co-organiser, we were connecting a conversation happening in FIIB, to a global dialogue on gender equity in workplaces.

The frameworks we work within, the UN SDGs and PRME's Seven Principles, are globally shared reference points. This means that everything FIIB Girl Up does in 2025 is legible and relevant to student organisations from Cairo to São Paulo to Seoul. Our peer-to-peer digital literacy model, our storytelling-led inclusion dialogues, and our participative advocacy march formats are all format-transferable; they don't require large budgets, specific infrastructure, or a particular institutional context. A student organisation in rural Indonesia or urban Brazil could adapt the "Teach One More" model tomorrow.

At FIIB, we also consciously bring global perspectives into local action. Engaging with experts from Naz Foundation, whose work spans global LGBTQIA+ advocacy, and collaborating with UN Girl Up's international network ensures that our students are not just learning about India's inclusion challenges, but situating them within a global conversation about what equitable, responsible societies look like.

1. Say It With Pride: Advancing Transgender Inclusion in Workspaces (in collaboration with UN Girl Up)

2. Bridging the Digital Gender Divide: Technology Training for Rural Girls under Unnat Bharat Abhiyan by Govt of India

3. Walkathon for Accessibility: Promoting Inclusive and Barrier-Free Communities

Mansi, 26-mansi@fiib.edu.in