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Who
we are:
Abhilasha Foundation was set up to honor the memory
of a young girl who came into this world and left
before she could experience its beauty and wonders.
What she left behind were memories of unprecedented
courage, immense perseverance and undying hope, and
the Foundation tries through its activities to honor
these memories by working with young children and
ensuring they can hope for a better future and for
a fuller life.
The foundation is based in the recently formed state
of Jharkhand in India, which has a high percentage
of forest or rural dwelling tribal population. These
people have been historically oppressed, and have
been in the grip of a vicious cycle of poverty led
by an agrarian lifestyle haunted by progressively
reducing land-holdings with each generation, overt
dependence on vanishing forests for sustenance and
low awareness of opportunities and rights. Given the
situation, children are looked at as a source of income
and form a significant labor pool. Culturally the
tribes engage their children in vocational work to
add to the family income, with education clearly not
being a focus.
In the recent past there has been increased intervention
by the government to provide alternate employment
opportunities to adult members of the community via
increased public work efforts, where they work as
daily wage laborers. The situation now has taken a
different turn with both the men and women of the
household now away from home for long durations -
the normal social care system of the tribal community
has been uprooted, essentially leaving the children
to the care of the very frail members of the community,
who are not able to guide these children well and
continue using them for menial tasks.
One solution to this is the formation of a "child
care" system (balwadis) in the villages while
educating the parents that the minor amount of vocational
help their children provide is far out-weighed by
longer term benefits of education and overall development,
it having the interventional capability to break them
out of their negative cycle. Incentivising this by
also providing basic benefits like meals, clothes,
etc. free in the balwadis helps in pulling in quite
a big population of tribal children into the child
care system. The foundation makes sure the village
has skin in the game by asking the villagers to provide
it with an area / house to serve as the school. Abhilasha
Foundation has chosen this method of intervention
to help the children of these communities.
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