Dream Catchers

Kathkari tribals by their innate culture and lifestyle actively practice child marriage. As a result, a child is forced into a marriage and family life at the age of 12 -17 years. It not only snatches their childhood and adolescents from them but also leads to early child and mother's death due to early pregnancy for which a child’s body is not ready, causes malnutrition, and creates a family crisis as they get into extra and multiple marital affairs and abandonment of the children as the other partner would not like to accommodate the children from the previous marriage. As a result of incessant awareness and interventional process, we have first-generation learners in the school and also above 350 – 400 unmarried adolescents fighting child marriage and dreaming of a different future. The Trust provide educational assistance to the children and adolescents through daily supplementary classes in 22 hamlets and by providing educational materials. However, the students tend to drop out from 9th standard as their parents are not ready to pay off the required fees. Though we have supported more than 100 students to continue their education through scholarship programs it is impossible to support larger numbers and they tend to return to the child marriage system

We have been supporting the tribal children and adoloscents through individual scholarship. Since we are not able to manage alone supporting them through mere scholarships, we launch a project called “Dream catchers” where we uphold the dream of the children and adolescents not only to study but also to assist them to pursue education at high school, higher secondary and graduation level and through all these to change their lives and that of their families. We were successful in making the tribal parents as stake holders of this project through which they too will contribute monthly a simple amount as per their capacity (E.g., Rs.50/- as almost all of them are daily wage earners or depend on the forest and river for their daily living). We have promoted a sub-project called “scrap out for education” through which we encourage people to contribute to sell the scraps and donate to the education of the tribal children. Since we know that all these will contribute to a minimum amount we want to launch our project on a larger level so that our students an estimated number of 500 -600 students can study and they can dream of a DIFFERENT FUTURE – for themselves, their families, tribal communities at large. 

• Every child will receive assistance to enjoy their education
• Child marriages will be stopped
• Children and adolescents will enjoy their right to be educated
• Early child and mother death will be reduced
• Malnutrition could be controlled and prevented
• The tribal communities will evolve as better civilised & developed communities