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India

India has the highest number of child brides in the world, close to 10.1 million children are child labourers, 42.7 million are out of school, 109 children are sexually abused everyday and every eight minutes a child goes missing.The country has one of the highest rates of violence against women. In India, we address child labour in mica mines, empower child brides, address child sexual exploitation in the Devadasi system, advocate for the prevention of child marriage and child trafficking, and provide economic empowerment to mother’s in poverty. Help us Fight Child Exploitation in India.

Our work in India

We work in vulnerable rural areas across states of Karnataka, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Odisha and Kerala.

We take children and their families out of exploitation by providing them with education, livelihood support, health care, legal support and encouraging child participation for advocacy. We also involve stakeholders such as the Government, Law Enforcement Agencies and the Private sector to help us tackle issues.

Read the country profile

Into the classroom

To combat exploitation, children are enrolled in schools, provided school supplies such as uniforms, books, bags and given access to quality education through activity based and digital learning. Children enrolled in school who have learning gaps are also enrolled in remedial classes to ensure age appropriate learning. Parents are counselled on the importance of education and the learning environment is made to be enriching and joyful so that children don’t choose to drop out. Child brides who find it difficult to go back to school are enrolled for public exams as private candidates.

Addressing girl child well being

Apart from tuition and study material support, we provide bicycles to girls who are not allowed to go to school due to long distances. Girls are helped to file cases for domestic violence and other forms of abuse meted out to them. Girls with anaemia are given supplementary nutrition and taken for health check ups. Child brides are advised against early pregnancy and early union. Awareness on menstrual hygiene, life skill development, psychosocial support and child rights training are also provided to ensure girl child development. 

Stories from India

July 1st, 2022

Children become COVID heroes

7 year old Appu (name anonymised) belongs to a small village in the East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh.…

June 7th, 2022

Suku and Her Siblings Continuing their Education

One principle of Terre des Hommes Netherlands is that children should have a childhood where they can learn, p…

June 1st, 2022

From Lifting and Digging to Advocating

At 6 am when the rooster crowed, Rinku* woke up. Feeling dull, she freshened up and stepped out for her day’s…

Advocacy inspires Action

We specifically focus on fighting for the rights of the children through Child Participation approaches. We have created a movement for married adolescent girls where they advocate for their entitlements. Children are grouped into clubs where they are trained on child rights, child protection laws and advocacy. Through this, many children have solved village level issues, reported cases of child labour, child marriage and child exploitation.

Our Youth Advocates have also conducted various innovative campaigns such as rallies and flash mobs to sensitise the public on the need to voice against child marriage and child trafficking.

Read India's Annual Report

 In 2021, our team in India reached out to nearly 39,000 children across 7 states, addressing child labour, child marriage, child sexual exploitation and gender-based violence.The team also faced the severe second wave of COVID-19 and its after effects. Cases of child exploitation were on the rise, education was affected, and families plunged deeper into poverty. This further increased their vulnerabilities, specifically access to proper health care.

Read India's Annual Report

Overcoming poverty

Poverty fuels child exploitation. To address this, we provide monetary assistance to families such that they invest in additional income generating activities such as livestock development, tailoring, fruit selling, thereby earning more income. Girls at risk of exploitation are also provided skill training to become financially independent. Women are grouped into SHGs where a corpus is revolved among them from which each of them invest in small businesses. The money is ploughed back into the fund at a minimum service, thereby building the corpus to reach out to more women. Families are also given access to social security.

Our programmes

Learn about our programmes

Partners

In India, we work with a network of grassroots organisations to implement our programmes. We are affiliated with Children of India Foundation , a community driven organisation, which leads the implementation of our programmes in India

Check our Endline Evaluation
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