Building a Future for Brick Kiln Children in India

Over the past year, this project has supported more than 1735 parents and their children. These families are from very marginalised tribal communities who migrate for dangerous, bonded-labour work. As such, it is very difficult for children to access any form of formal education. Our project is working to ensure that children are getting a basic level of education and eventually able to access more mainstream education. Key achievements over the last year include:

• 250 children aged 6 to 12 have participated in non-formal education settings, preparing them to access mainstream school
• 93 students from 1st - 4th standard have enrolled in the Zilla Parishad School
• 61 children aged 0-5 and their parents have benefitted from our potali parenting and early education programme
• 62 girls have been intensively supported in their education, helping them to stay in school

As the communities struggle to cover basic living needs, children often do not have resources to enable them to participate in school. The project has been able to provide shoes, books, umbrellas, study material, stationary, school uniforms and solar lights to help them engage in education.

Our mobile education van is proving to be a very successful way of engaging with parents and children and regularly visits Zilla Parishad Schools to provide additional study support for students. The van contains a library so that children can borrow books. We are also using tablet computers to engage the children in e-learning. Cartoons really help the youngest students to learn basic English and Marathi. The children especially enjoy singing songs and poems!

The project is also providing nutritional and medical support to the families, ensuring that all children get vaccinated and that families understand the importance of cleanliness to minimise disease.

We are delighted that the project is getting many visitors from other NGOs and government education organisations who are hoping to learn from its successes. We are hoping to build up a model that can be replicable across the many brick kiln sites that exist across Maharashtra state.

There have been a number of exciting developments with this project over the past six months. In the first few months of 2015 a one-off grant of £5,000 from Karuna enabled the project team to buy and equip a new mobile learning centre which now travels between the brick kiln sites offering the children access to new learning resources such as educational dvds and tablet computers. We recently visited the project and were able to see the van in action for the first time. The kids are really enthused and excited by the new technology and their parents like to get involved to! Using e-resources means that we are able to deliver a high level of education in isolated areas to inspire and engage. 

We also have just completed an independent evaluation of the project. One highlight is the success of the non-formal education project in enrolling and retaining children in school. 30 students have passed 4th standard this year. The parents attitude to education has transformed. During the first year of the project, parents did not send children to class. Now they send their chidden regularly at 10:00am.  Some come to school and help clean the classroom. Some parents volunteer to conduct class if the teachers are not present in the school. They encourage students to go to school. With the support of these parents, the children are positively progressing in education and the relationship with the local school is very positive. The project is demonstrating to the teachers that children who were thought "unteachable" are in fact able to learn and schools are coming to visit the project to find out how!

This is great news for the sustainability of the project. We are working with the partner to develop this into a model of best practice which hopefully can be rolled out to more brick kilns in the future.