Improving the lives of children living on the streets of Mumbai

Mumbai Smiles Foundation, in a bid to improve the lives of Mumbai’s street children, has developed a plan that makes the kids a beneficiary for many of its projects

16th May

Seeing the smile on a child’s face lights up our day!
The question we need to ask ourselves is – don’t these smiling faces deserve a better life ?

You are most likely to see a child begging at street signals or inside Mumbai’s local trains. Some of them sell products to make ends meet. In the quest to make a livelihood, the education and future of these children continues to remain in darkness.
Over 1,00,000 street children in Mumbai live such lives, and unless we do something to empower them, developing countries will continue to suffer.

To end the cycle of poverty, Mumbai Smiles Foundation in its 2019-20 plan, will focus on street children as one of their two key programmes.

The goal of the programme is to improve the lives and conditions of these street children and their families.
As part of this, Mumbai Smiles Foundation will launch 7 new Preschool Centres for Street Children this year, at Deonar, Sathe Nagar, and at Saibangoda/Aarey Milk Colony.

Already active with 2 pre-schools last year that focused on street children, we continue our promise in making a difference to the lives of these children by deepening and scaling our programme this year.

As part of the plan, our programme for Street Children include:

• Providing preschool education, health and nutritional services for children aged 2-6 years.
• Supporting the school education of street children through provision of educational materials and financial grants.
• Life skills education.
• Improving knowledge and increasing awareness about Right to Identity among street children and their families.
• Providing support to beneficiaries to access their Right to Identity.

In addition to all these facilities, Mumbai Smiles Foundation will also run a mobile unit that will identify street children across specific slum pockets of Mumbai and provide them and their families with basic needs.

In our own little way, we hope to end the cycle of poverty for these street children and their families.