The project seeks to enable children living in extremely violence-ridden, poor, and socio-culturally marginalized waste-picking community in India to reach their full potential through access to and retention in formal education. The learning centers work to enable communities to build capacity to educate children. As children enter schools, the biggest challenge is to retain them there, and to ensure they do not slip back into wastepicking. This proposal will target 100 such children.
Picking trash is a popular occupation in Delhi because of the 8000 tons it produces everyday. This provides work to the unskilled, underage and poor (60,000 in Delhi alone). The combination of large amounts of waste and abject poverty creates the ideal condition for children to be pushed into work. Working as a wastepicker comes at a cost, especially if you're a child as it stops children from studying and deprives children of their health. It also leaves such children more vulnerable to abuse.
Chintan's 'No Child in Trash' programme enables such children to move from dumpsites to schools. In a nutshell, Chintan identifies wastepicking children in an area, holds bridge classes, incentivizes them to attend these, and then finally, helps these children to move to mainstream education. In order to do this, we use our learning centres as sites to prepare the children and their families for a formal education in two ways: pedagogically and emotionally.
Chintan will work to enable 100 children (and their families), living in extremely violence-ridden, poor, and socio-culturally marginalized waste-picking community in India to reach their full potential through access to and retention in formal education, and by building community support. This will enable them to get used to a structured way of life, explore opportunities out of wastepicking, recognize their rights as children and human beings, and aim for a more dignified way of life.
This project has provided additional documentation in a DOCX file (projdoc.docx).
