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.