OEPMC – Opening Educational Pathways for Migrant Children

In India today, 4% of our children never start school. 58% don’t complete primary schools. And 90% don’t complete school, the fact that only 10% of our children go on to college is a sad picture of a developing country where even a basic right of education are compromised.

Migrant children are among the most vulnerable in India. Constantly moving with their parents in search of work, they are denied formal schooling and basic protection. Our Day Care Centres, set up at construction sites, offer early childhood education, nutrition, and health support through Creches, Balwadis, and Bridge Courses. We work closely with builders, parents, and schools to mainstream these children into the formal education system.

The migrant child is forced to drop out of school as they accompany their impoverished parents out of the villages and into nearby cities in search of work. Such children are relegated to living in unhygienic, unsafe and non-child-friendly environments, often at the brick kiln/construction sites where the parents work. The migrant child is sucked into the vortex of hard labour as they try and support their parents out of the poverty, thereby losing their childhood and all opportunities of education and a future. They are denied government protection, social security, medical and nutritional support, and citizen’s rights in the process of endless mobility and transition from one region to another. Children of migrant laborers are completely invisible in this vicious process and they in particular miss out on education.

Through our projects, covering migrant children, we seek to create a sustainable and enabling environment to ensure that these groups of children get access to schooling. We provides quality education opportunities to these children at risk of becoming working children. Our initiatives provide an avenue through which children who have dropped out of school or have never been to school, can bridge the gap between age level and learning using a curriculum designed specifically to ease their transition into the formal education system.

New Vision provides educational services to children of migrant construction laborers and works toward achieving systemic changes that result in sustainable improvements in the access and quality of services available to these marginalized migrant families. An elaborately designed integrated program that focuses on Holistic Development, health and life skill competencies, learning through a non-formal developmentally appropriate, fun filled, categorically divided into three aspects: