Social exclusion and violence:
Education for social cohesion

Education against exclusion

Bhopal, India

Education against Exclusion is a project aimed at making elementary education accessible to all Indian children of the region of Bhopal, who are today excluded from society because of poverty and racial-ethnic prejudices. In order to manage to do this, the Help and Action Association and other NGOs are trying to settle educational centers of a new kind to receive and, particularly, retain this public. The Indian educational system is the most extended in the world, and it has over 150 million children between 6 and 15 years registered in schools. But approximately a third of them cannot attend classes, and half of the children registered for the first grade, can really come to classes only four years later. (Aide et Action NGO have provided these figures and they are found in its magazine "Schoolchildren of the World" of June 2000; N° 75, page 8).

In collaboration with other NGO partners and in order to help, in different ways, the working children abandoned and even sold by their parents, Aide et Action tries to relocate these children in the school system and keep them there. For a number of children who work as slaves and who cannot leave their activities, Aide et Action and its partners are starting informal centers, within the production units, which provide them with classes and try to regain them progressively for the cause of education. In a second stage, wherever these "schools" arrive, Educational Committees are established to keep these field actions going in time. The organization is working to set a strategy to give children the autonomy and self-confidence they lack.

By its interventions, the NGO Aide et Action allows children to acquire competence and reassume the taste of living. At the same time, that indirectly equips them to struggle against Indian children's forced labor. The project has been the first step towards cooperation among the different NGO s in the region that hope to maintain and develop this partnership and synergy in their future actions.

Aide et Action
53, boulevard de Charonne
75545 Paris Cedex 11
Tel : +33 (0)1 55 25 70 00
Fax : +33 (0)1 55 25 70 29
Site web : www.aide-et-action.org
e-mail :info@aide-et-actio.org

Institutional Partners
Ong Deepalaya Indian Council for Child Welfare
Financial Partners
Donors and godfathers

The Bhopal office was opened in 1999.

Internal evaluations