Education For All

Empowering the marginalized with quality education,
Back to school programmes for slum children,
Child rights and gender justice programmes
Scholarships for vulnerable children and youth, who are victims of domestic violence and the breakdown of the family.

Empowering Young At Risk

We specialize in working for young people, taking up any venture that could answer the needs of the young wherever they are. We work with institutions that provide rehabilitation, counselling, and housing for orphans, children, and youth who have run away from abusive households, come from single-parent households living in extreme poverty and have fled from child labour or human trafficking. Bosco Seva Kendra directly supports a network of homes for such children and youth in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. At present around 1,600 children and youth benefit from our support across seven campuses in seven major urban areas.

Bosco Seva Kendra also works with a number of independent organizations that directly provide access to such safety nets for children and youth in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana where children, women, and girls from broken homes and households are provided with similar services. These children and youth are transferred to our schools and skill training centers for education and certification.

We educate the young people all over the by offering:

Academic and technical education at all levels,
Non-formal job-oriented training programmes for those who cannot enter the mainstream to pursue a career,
Providing leisure-time activities like youth centres, supportive and empowering services such as counselling, sports, music and arts.
A high-priority area for us is the work for the Young at Risk (YaR) — those who, often through parental neglect or society’s failure, have been pushed to the margins and exposed to all kinds of risks and are therefore the most vulnerable sections in any society.

We support a network of seven institutions dedicated towards providing housing, education, skill training, counselling and related services to orphans, abandoned children, children rescued from child labour, human trafficking and those from broken homes. These centres work with police, state social workers and civil services to ensure that abandoned children have access to dignified housing and child services.

Youth at Risk Centers are residential homes where we provide housing, rehabilitation, counseling, education, and skill training to poor children and youth who are abandoned, rescued from child labor, human trafficking or come from homes where their parents or legal guardians are not able to care for them. Children and youth residing in these centers are registered with the police and have been transferred to us by state social workers. We cannot accept any child unless we have legal consent from the state, the parent, legal guardian, and the police. Our primary mission is to ensure that the child stays with the family, we accept children only if other circumstances are not available.

Our organization ‘Don Bosco’ is primarily known for operating homes for abandoned children. In our region and across India we have staff members and volunteers stationed in public areas and other hotspots where we engage with children who have run away from home, live on the street or live in abject poverty. The table below are the number of centers we operate in our region and the number of youth who reside in those centers.

In Vishakhapatnam, we operate two campuses one in the heart of the city and the other outside the city. At Don Bosco Navajeevan, Vijayawada we operate three homes for children and youth in different parts of the city. In Hyderabad, we have four campuses with one serving as a safe home exclusively for girls and women, the other three cater to boys of different age groups. The rest of our centers operate one campus only.

The State Governments of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are deeply appreciative of the work we are doing in the region. In 2016, the Police of Hyderabad rescued 250 children trapped in child labor in the city, the police turned to our Navajeevan in Hyderabad to rehabilitate and return those children to their families or legal guardians.

Our organization as rule chooses not to accept children into our homes across our region, we prefer that children live with their parents, if possible, despite the hardships they will face at home, or with appropriate legal guardians of the family. Furthermore, apart from providing residential care and child services, we also undertake outreach programs in slum areas where we help families in those communities enroll their children in government schools, primary healthcare centers operated by the government, and support in getting government identity cards to attain various social services. Every year around 10,000 slum children and their families engage with staff members who are employed in these various centers.

Educational Opportunities for Poor Children, Youth and Young People

We work with donors to fund the education of poor children, youth and young people in rural and urban schools, colleges, technical schools and skill training centers. This sponsorship extends towards providing residential care, uniforms, clothes and other essentials for beneficiaries.

We work with a network of Don Bosco Schools and Colleges in our region that provide educational opportunities to poor children in rural and urban areas. Several of these institutions are located in rural areas where access to quality education is limited to non-existent. Mainstream education is one of our contributions for the good of the society.

We work with schools and trade schools that provide low-cost education to children who come from households that live in extreme poverty. We work with schools that are located in poor rural communities that suffer from grave economic hardships with limited to no economic mobility and access to quality education. Our work with such institutions is to advance access to education through scholarships and other forms of financial assistance.

As part of our commitment to advancing educational opportunities, Bosco Seva Kendra operates a network of tuition centers that provide free after school programs for children living in urban and rural slums where their parents are uneducated and cannot support their educational formation when they return home from school can access these tuition centers for academic support. This commitment to education also extends to skill training, formal technical education, and higher education for poor youth and young people.

Child Rights Education

Making children better informed citizens has been our forte. In 14 districts of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, we are networking with 560 State-run schools through a field team of 40+.

Adult Literacy Programs

In our region around 70% of the total population is considered educated, this metric has been sourced from a survey undertaken by the Government of India several years ago and the metric considers those who are literate to have received a primary education only.

Literacy is essential to advancing the rule of law, good governance, gender equality, and economic mobility. In recent years we have organized adult literacy programs in rural and urban slums in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and South Odisha. Over 4,000 adults have attended these programs focused on critical thinking, reading, writing, and mathematics. The program lasts for four months with men and women separated during training sessions. The programs are effective in ensuring that communities value the importance of education.

As an organization we believe that education is the best mechanism to eliminate extreme poverty in India.