Every six months, Give2Asia features several projects that require immediate funding in their Greatest Needs catalogue. These projects have been vetted by Give2Asia and then broken into scalabe sizes for donors to invest in. The purpose is to showcase needs in the region, highlight the work that local, on the ground, organizations are doing and then provide a mechanism for those that choose to act. I will share some of these projects in the next three posts.
Partner: Chintan Environmental Research & Action Group
Cost: $5,000 provides education for 40 child trash pickers in Delhi; $52,000 trains 8,000 leaders in the trash-picker community
The Challenge. 300,000 of Delhi’s inhabitants make a living retrieving recyclable trash, collecting 1,000 tons of waste on a daily basis. While trash-picking is treated as one of the most lowly occupations in urban India, trash-pickers are also responsible for recycling nearly 20% of Delhi’s trash, which would otherwise go to landfills. With growing development and consumption in India, it is estimated that Delhi will generate 20,000 tons of waste daily by 2020. Supporting this large group of trash recyclers in India’s largest city is an important strategy to tackle both poverty and environmental degradation.
The Solution. This project will help to organize and protect Delhi’s trash-picker community in a number of ways that help them gain respect in the community, while also creating opportunities for their children to gain an education and escape poverty.
Supporting Leadership: Chintan will identify leaders among the waste recyclers. The leaders will be trained to understand their role in the city, as well as the various rights, benefits, and social security services available, which many of them do not access currently. Also, the project will help them understand issues about governance, and help them find ways to seek a voice with their elected representatives. Finally, these change leaders will build networks with businesses that generate waste, the municipality, teachers, students, schools, and NGOs that have a stake in the work of the trash-picker community. In this process, they will be able to protect themselves from exploitation and build awareness around the value of their work.
Educating Children: The project will offer intensive informal education in the afternoons, when the children are free from work, in order to bring them up to speed with children their own age who are in school. The classes include math, Hindi, science, and other basic subjects that give the children an opportunity rejoin the public school system. Then, on a case-by-case basis, the children will be found a place and admitted to formal public schools. A follow-up outreach program will monitor their success and help them to stay in school. Older children will be helped to study in open schools, and special classes will be run for them to ensure they keep up with their classmates.
About the Chintan Environmental & Research Action Group
Chintan is a registered non-profit creating partnerships with the urban poor in Delhi to help them break the cycle of poverty. Chintan believes that it is critical to work directly with marginalized communities in India to form new kinds of partnerships to move toward a vision of an environmentally and socially just world.
Photo courtesy of Give2Asia
