Preschool education: one of the key solutions against human trafficking

At Mumbai Smiles we focus our action on the peaceful fight against trafficking. This means that we work with a global problem, which involves a lot of networking with other organizations and institutions. And in recent years it has also meant a territorial expansion of our projects. Although during the first 15 years of our work we have operated in India, especially in Mumbai, since then we have expanded our action to Bangladesh, Nepal and this last year also to Spain.

Thus, we approach the fight against trafficking from prevention, rescue and rehabilitation. In this article we want to explain one of the projects of the prevention phase: preschool education. We focus on this specific program, not without underlining that education occupies a key place in the fight against trafficking at all ages and in the three phases of action that we have indicated.

Through our preschool education project, we not only guarantee access to a right for many boys and girls who would be excluded from it, we also manage to avoid new cases of trafficking through schooling and raising awareness among families about their vulnerability to this terrible problem.

The 23-24 academic year

At the beginning of the course we told you that 243 students had already enrolled in the 11 nursery schools that we have indifferent locations in Mumbai. Today the number of students has increased to 255 students. This increase is due to the constant work of our door-to-door team to talk to families about the importance of schooling. Often, these little ones (from 2 to 6 years old) are working, or searching through the

trash to be able to sell something “valuable.” It is not easy for families to give up these rupees on which their microeconomy depends, but it is very important to influence the future of their sons and daughters.

We also highlight the following activities, beyond the monitoring of the curriculum defined for the course:

• Working with families to combat school absenteeism
• Nutritional monitoring and health status of children
• Meetings with families to evaluate the operation of the course
• Continuous training of teachers and assistants
• Medical reviews
• I emphasized the importance of knowing the phone number of parents in case they get lost.
• And especially the work done with all families to know and guarantee the Rights of Children.

These activities, added to a multitude of songs, language and mathematics exercises, dances and sports, result in intense days full of learning and smiles that are the basis for being able to continue #TransformingFutures.