What TFWA Care did for... Lovedale Foundation

Children should be living a fun, happy, care-free environment and not forced to work. Child labourers face the same health risks adult workers do, but at a much higher level. The lack of safe working conditions can be even more devastating and long lasting, resulting in fatal accidents, permanent disabilities, poor health, psychological and emotional damage. Consequentially, what is irreversible is the lost childhood.

Since 2002 in India, the Lovedale Foundation has been working to improve the lives of quarry children and their families in 20 villages in rural Bangalore. Lovedale Foundation’s mission is to eradicate child labor and prevent school drop-outs one family at a time through holistic development and education. Learning centres and shelters have been built to provide quality education both for children and their parents.  Lovedale’s school curriculum emphasizes on technology, math, art and sciences for the kids.  For adults, vocational courses are provided to develop job skills sets.  Women especially mothers are given hygiene, health and hygiene courses to better care for themselves and their children.   

Project in 2018

Bangalore is a fast growing e-commerce city undergoing a technological boom in the last years, buildings and sky scrapers are being built everywhere to cater to the growing businesses and its population. There has been a massive migration of cheap labour in Bangalore from the other parts of India seeking for jobs in construction projects settling with their families.  An estimate of 400,000 workers in the suburbs of Bangalore work in shifts of 12 hours a day and 6-7 days per week in the quarries with bare hands and primitive tools such as life chisels and dynamite without wearing the proper construction gear.  One can witness an entire family with the father, mother, and their young children working together in the quarries as they get together after a day’s work.  They work long arduous hours toiling in heat and pollution and are still unable to make ends meet with their meager income.

This year, TFWA Care will help Lovedale Foundation rescue and end child labor working in 17 quarry villages in suburban Bangalore.  The project will reach out to 700 children and their parents with the following objectives within 12 months period:

  • Enroll and keep 90% of the children in school.
  • Provide supplementary courses to prevent children from dropping out of school.
  • Provide remedial education centers in the quarry villages for the parents.
  • Fight malnutrition and provide basic health and dental care.
  • Provide therapy and other educational tools to the children to relieve their stress and concerns about continuing their education.
  • Create advocacy groups to improve the quality of schools in Bangalore  


Through proper education and holistic development, TFWA Care and the Lovedale Foundation will help fight child labour and end its vicious cycle starting in the quarry villages of the suburbs of Bangalore, India. One child and family at a time, TFWA Care is proud to partner with Lovedale Foundation this year.  It is a huge task but this partnership will embark on this ambitious goal.