Mothers of Courage, an Eight-Minute Film on Bihar Mothers Who Pledge to Keep Their Daughters in School, Won the UN SDG Action Award for Creativity in Rome on 29 October 2026

Mothers of Courage, an eight-minute documentary about women in rural Bihar who pledge to keep their daughters in school, won the Creativity Award at the Heroes of Tomorrow: UN SDG Action Awards in Rome on 29 October 2026. The UN SDG Action Campaign, which runs the awards, says the ninth edition drew more than 7,000 entries, and its winners’ release names the film ahead of the other two Creativity finalists, from Indonesia and South Africa. The Campaign’s release says more than 1.2 million people have joined the movement behind the film and pledged to keep their daughters in education and prevent early marriage.

The award and the other winners

The awards are run by the UN SDG Action Campaign, a special initiative of the UN Secretary-General that is hosted by the UN Development Programme in Bonn, Germany. On 6 October 2026 the Campaign announced nine finalists, three in each of three categories: Changemaker, Creativity and Resilience. The Creativity finalists were Mothers of Courage, Return Water Home (restoring springs in Indonesia) and Women for Change (on gender-based violence in South Africa).

The ceremony took place in Rome at 19.30 on 29 October and was broadcast through RAI, Italy’s national broadcaster, and UN Web TV. The other two winners were the Women’s Justice Initiative, which supports Indigenous women and girls in Guatemala and took the Resilience Award, and Rokiatou Traoré of Mali, who took the Changemaker Award for agroforestry work with women and smallholder farmers. The UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women and Girls received the honourable mention. Marina Ponti, the Campaign’s director, told the ceremony: “Change has always begun with people who refused to accept that the world could not be different.”

One figure differs between the Campaign’s own releases. The finalist announcement of 6 October says the applications came from 170 countries, and the winners’ release of 29 October says 190. Shikshagraha’s statement, as reported by The Hitavada on 1 November, also says 190 countries and territories.

The film and the women in it

Mothers of Courage is directed by Vandana R and produced by Butterfly Effect Media. According to the Shikshagraha release of 7 October, it follows mothers and mothers-in-law who challenge social norms that can stop girls continuing their education. Some argue for their daughters to stay in school, and others support their daughters-in-law in going back. Vandana R told The News Minute in May 2026 that the crew lived alongside the women, sharing meals and travelling with them, and that talk of caste, poverty, domestic violence and dropping out came up without anyone directing it.

The UN award followed other recognition that the organisers list. The News Minute confirms Best Inspirational Film at the 2026 Los Angeles Film Awards. The organisers’ releases add a Silver at the ABBY Awards 2026, Platinum and Gold SABRE awards, and a shortlist in the Sustainable Development Goals category at Cannes Lions 2026, which the 27 June release calls India’s only entry shortlisted there.

At the ceremony, Khushboo Awasthi, whom the Campaign’s release calls the Chief Curator of the movement, said: “This Award belongs to all mothers in the villages across India who are changing their daughters’ destiny.”

How a Shiksha Chaupal works

The film documents Shikshagraha, a movement to strengthen public education that, in its June and October releases, aims to improve all one million public schools in India. S D Shibulal, a co-founder and former chief executive of Infosys, champions it, and the Bengaluru non-profits ShikshaLokam and Mantra4Change support it. The Bihar work is built around the Shiksha Chaupal, a community gathering led by women. Shikshagraha describes mothers, teachers, panchayat members (elected village council members, covered in how panchayats work), school leaders and neighbours talking about what keeps children out of school. Its list of topics is dropping out, early marriage, money, unsafe journeys to school and missing documents.

The News Minute adds that the circles meet in goat sheds, front yards and government school verandahs, and that mothers raise problems such as the lack of toilets and the need for girls to do housework. It also reports that organisers going from village to village in the early days met verbal abuse and villagers carrying sticks, who feared the movement would disturb existing social arrangements.

Each meeting ends in a public commitment. The awards site says women pledge to support their daughters to complete secondary education and to ensure that girls are not married before the age of 18. The News Minute puts the schooling promise as at least until Class 12.

Shikshagraha’s site gives examples of what the meetings produce. Anita, a village-level worker from the Mahadalit community, learned at a Chaupal that many people in the Mushahar community had no Aadhaar card, and she organised a documentation camp. A 19-year-old in Lipani village, West Champaran, who had left school after matriculation in 2022, returned to higher secondary after her mother took the pledge and found out about scholarships. Both accounts come from the organisation and have not been checked independently.

The numbers, as the organisers report them

Shikshagraha’s timeline starts in October 2024, when the first round of Chaupals in Bihar led more than 68,000 families across seven districts to pledge support for girls completing school. Its fifth round, in December 2025, covered more than 4,500 villages and 9,600 Chaupals in 14 districts, with more than 261,000 participants. The movement’s dashboard, read on 5 November 2026, shows two states (Bihar and Karnataka), 14 districts, more than one million community members participating and 1,253 community leaders.

The totals in public statements rose through 2026:

• 19 May: The News Minute reports that more than 8 lakh (800,000) women have publicly sworn to keep their daughters in school.
• 27 June: the Cannes Lions release says more than 28,000 gatherings across 14 districts and more than 800,000 citizens mobilised.
• 7 October: the finalist release says more than 44,892 gatherings since October 2024 and more than 1.19 million citizens across 14 districts.
• 29 October: the Campaign says over 1.2 million people have joined and pledged.

The counts measure different things, people at meetings in some and women who took the pledge in others, so they are not one series. The News Minute’s May report places the pledges across 16 districts, while every later statement says 14.

The situation the pledge speaks to

The 2019-21 National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), run by the International Institute for Population Sciences for the Union health ministry, recorded 41 per cent of women aged 20 to 24 in Bihar as married before the legal minimum age of 18, almost unchanged from the previous round. It also found that 39 per cent of women aged 15 to 49 had never been to school. The pledge’s two commitments, secondary school and no marriage before 18, speak to those two measures. For the state’s wider profile, see Bihar at a glance.

What has been claimed and what is still to be measured

The Campaign’s release says girls who had dropped out of school have returned and marriages have been postponed, and gives no numbers for either. The awards site, with figures as of September 2026, says hundreds of children have been supported to enrol or return to school. The sources read for this article contain no enrolment, attendance or marriage-age data from anyone other than the organisers, and no third-party evaluation. Those figures would show what the 1.2 million pledges have changed.

Vandana R told The News Minute that the team wants to keep documenting the women and build a longer, feature-length documentary.