US-based NGO funds children

US-based NGO funds children
SREELATHA MENON

NEW DELHI, MARCH 15: Many of the little children who help their parents in the glass bangle units in Ferozabad are now going to school. At least a 100 kids are part of a project by an organisation called Disha which provides work, shelters and equipment for the parents in return for sending the children to school. The project is one of the eight which received funds worth $ 75,000 on Tuesday from the US-based Christian Children's Fund (CCF). It is also the first of the several projects which will receive funds from the CCF through their Indian counterpart the Child Fund of India (CFI) which was formerly launched on Tuesday by Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit.

CCF president John Shultz, who handed over funds to the NGOs, told The Indian Express that his organisation aimed at reaching out to child development projects all over the country through NGOs. To network with the various NGOs, it has chosen an Indian organisation called the Child Fund of India which was actually formed with its assistance a decade ago. Our funds are meant to give a strong push to CFI's projects for children in difficult situations, Shukltz said.

Shultz said that CCF had been aiding child welfare in India as well as in other countries for the past several decades through sponsorship of children. In India at least 70,000 children in homes run by CCF's Indian unit have sponsors abroad. "But the projects that we now want to fund are for children in situations where sponsorship cannot be a solution," he said. And these include children picking rags, or helping parents in industrial units, or suffering the consequences of having an HIV infected parent.

Dr S D Gokhlale, the president of the CFI, said that the number of NGOs getting funds through it will go on increasing while the funds from CCF will double in the coming year.

The projects which received funds also included Young Women's Christian Association project for rag pickers, two projects for children at risk due to AIDS in Gujarat and Maharashtra, a project for working children in Pune, two projects for children at risk due to leprosy by Foundation for Elimination of Leprosy in India and Gandhi Memorial Leprosy Foundation and a project for children of women convicts' in Tihar Jail in the Capital.