Rouble Nagi is a Mumbai-based educator and social activist who has developed a distinctive model of community learning that takes education beyond classrooms and into public space.
Often described as “taking school to the street”, her work uses public walls, neighbourhood spaces and art-led learning centres to reach children who are out of school or at high risk of dropping out.
Her approach gained global recognition in February 2026, when she won the $1m Global Teacher Prize at the World Governments Summit in Dubai.
Accounts from news reports and prize citations trace Nagi’s journey from a conventional teaching role to a large-scale community educator. She has described her work as a gradual, cumulative effort that began more than two decades ago with a small group of children.
Over time, it expanded into a wide informal learning network that, according to prize profiles, has reached more than a million children, including many who had never been enrolled in formal schooling.
What sets Nagi’s work apart is its reliance on visual, place-based pedagogy. She is best known for transforming walls in low-income neighbourhoods into educational murals that teach literacy, numeracy, science, history and civic values.
These murals are not intended as decoration but as teaching tools, designed for communities where schooling is often disrupted by migration, precarious work or lack of infrastructure.
The Global Teacher Prize profile describes this approach as “Living Walls of Learning”, emphasising their dual role in instruction and community pride.
Alongside these public interventions, Nagi has built a parallel network of learning centres through the Rouble Nagi Art Foundation (RNAF).
International coverage credits the foundation with establishing more than 800 centres across India, aimed both at children who are out of school and those who need additional academic support.
RNAF describes these centres as community spaces that grow out of art camps and continue to operate beyond one-off workshops. Over time, the foundation’s mandate has broadened to include women’s empowerment, youth skill-building and community development.
A major strand of Nagi’s public work is Misaal Mumbai, a slum transformation initiative that began with the Paint Dharavi project in 2016.
Media profiles describe how the effort scaled through volunteer and resident participation to paint more than 150,000 homes across informal settlements.
Prize and organisational accounts also highlight related interventions, including sanitation drives, waterproofing work and hygiene education. While impact figures vary across sources, they consistently point to the project’s scale and visibility.
Across profiles and interviews, Nagi’s work is framed as a response to persistent structural barriers in urban informal settlements: poverty, irregular school attendance, child labour pressures, early marriage risks and social exclusion. Rather than waiting for ideal conditions, her model adapts to these realities through flexible schedules, low-cost materials and creative methods that link education to confidence and employability.
Her international visibility is now anchored by the Global Teacher Prize, with global media portraying her as an educator-activist using art to widen access to learning.
Prize profiles also note a series of earlier awards and exhibitions, including the selection of her work for permanent display at the Rashtrapati Bhavan Museum.
According to recent reporting, Nagi plans to use the prize money to establish an institute offering free vocational training, extending her long-standing emphasis on education as a pathway to dignity and economic participation.
Taken together, her work occupies a space where India’s education system often struggles: the intersection of learning, public space and social dignity. For the children she targets, the first step is not always a classroom, but a wall that speaks to them, a nearby centre that feels safe, and a community that begins to see education as a tool for shaping life rather than interrupting it.
