India’s rapid economic growth in the past 30 years has produced opportunities for many, but it has also brought economic inequality on a large scale. In some places where ChildFund works in India, the result is widespread child labor, which places children in danger and deprives them of a full education.
The mining industry, for example, uses child workers because their small size allows them to fit into small underground spaces. It’s no place for a child to be, because of the short-term and long-term risks. Other children are taken from home and are forced to work in the cotton industry, and still others work in the bangle trade, welding glass bracelets over hot, smoky fires. In most cases, families have little choice but to involve children in their work, just to be able to support their households.
To combat the problem of child labor, ChildFund has taken different tacks. With local partners, we started a learning center in a village that was particularly notorious for children working alongside their parents, missing school most of the time. A young man volunteered to run the center and to encourage teachers, who sometimes weren’t showing up for work, to open a nearby middle school regularly. The learning center serves lunches, and today, children no longer go to work with their parents. Instead, they go to class.
In other regions, ChildFund assists parents with training for different jobs that pay higher wages, which help children remain in school and away from forced labor, and we provide scholarships for older students, who are often pressured to leave school to look after younger siblings, get married or go to work. With more time in school and in post-secondary studies, young women and men have greater opportunities to find well-paid, non-exploitative work as adults, a step away from poverty.