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I've been working with girls throughout the world for the past nine years. My relationship and understanding of rural areas where girls are marginalized, have shaped who I am today.

I Co-Founded Atoot to empower girls in Nepal through sports. It's a really amazing development to watch girls have daily opportunities, when earlier, they didn’t have any opportunities, were never able to leave the home, and had never played sports.

It does not mean that they’re going to be the next superstar. It’s about empowering them with opportunities that boys and men have all the time – a disparity that’s amplified in parts of the world where girls are valued even less.

When there is no existing ecosystem to build empowerment, we start by just opening up simple opportunities such as educational classes and daily football sessions, while showing them actual love and mentorship with our own employees at Atoot.

One of the rules we have at Atoot is that boys cannot join our program, unless they bring three new girls with them. And those three girls have to remain daily – it can't just be they bring them once and then that's it.

If boys want to be in our programming, they have to make sure that they are advocating for the girls around them. And not just advocating for the girls around them, but understanding the difficulties of what girls go through just to come to our programming, and the barriers they face to access any type of opportunity.

Through this, we are building an empowered ecosystem in the villages we are in, where we get to watch these young girls grow and fight for their own rights and fight for the rights of all the girls and the women in the villages around them.

The minute we give them a sustainable platform, they just run with it, and they forget what it's like to not have these types of platforms.

[As told to @Ragi Gupta]