Save the Children Project Visit - Child Domestic Workers, West Bengal

Please see below information from Save the Children on the project that we will be visiting in Calcutta.

Background information:
An astounding 16.4 million children in India are working. Save the Children is the first organisation in India to focus on an ‘invisible’ group of child workers: those in domestic work. Children in domestic work typically lose out on several basic rights – including the rights to adequate food and education. Employers do not allow them free time to play, and a shockingly large percentage are abused, either verbally, physically or sexually. Living in a situation of daily insults, little food, beatings, and no education, such children lose their childhood.

For the past three years, we have been:
· encouraging parents to fetch back children from domestic work and put them into schools, informing communities on the need to stop sending children to cities for work
· motivating employers with child employees to treat them humanely and to send them to school
· encouraging potential employers to stop employing children as domestic help.
· informing the public and raising awareness to the issue of child domestic work

Since Save the Children began this programme, we have succeeded in sending 1700 children back to their villages. In turn, these children have become change agents, working in their communities to stop the scourge of children in domestic work.

The girls pictured above work as child domestic workers, but are given a couple of hours of a day to go to the Save the Children run drop in centre where they learn basic skills.