Child Action partnered with the British Asian Trust, one of the King's Charities, to deliver Enterprise 4 Change — a one-year programme that helped UK primary school children explore the resilience, courage and ingenuity of children growing up in Mumbai's most challenging communities.
Across 115 London primary schools — roughly 5,750 children aged 8–12 — pupils took part in one to six experiential lessons, each one to two hours long. Every lesson focused on a core life skill such as ambition, empathy, budgeting, interdependence or resilience, taught through the real experiences of children living in Mumbai's street and slum settlements.
Children were invited to bring in recycling — echoing the recycling heaps where many Mumbai children work — and challenged to turn those materials into items they could "sell" to earn their (heavily subsidised) school lunch. The exercise taught resourcefulness, entrepreneurship and budgeting, and gave UK pupils a vivid, hands-on understanding of urban poverty and global development.
The project also introduced philanthropy. Pupils were encouraged to take action and fundraise for their peers in Mumbai, with schools raising £9,645 in a single year for Doorstep School and Toybank. We followed up with assemblies, case studies and child-friendly impact reports, so children could see exactly how their efforts helped.
