Wonder on Wheels, 2020-Present

Overview
The ‘Wonder on Wheels’ project addresses early childhood educational disruptions among the children of migrant construction workers in Bengaluru, India, as a poverty alleviation initiative. The children of migrant workers in Bengaluru face dual challenges: (a) a domestic, seasonal, and cyclic migration pattern precluding sustained contact with government-funded schooling within Greater Bengaluru through the standard academic year, and (b) critically under-funded government schools incapable of providing adequate educational and recreational facilities for their constituents. My 2019 interview research with key stakeholders - migrant worker families, state government officials within the Ministry of Women and Child Development, and NGOs working in the field of education - informed my ideation and execution of one intervention to address both issues: An ambulatory educational facility equipped with teachers and learning kits, able to travel between under-resourced government schooling facilities (anganwadis) attended - if only briefly - by the children of migrant workers. For periods ranging from a few months to up to three years, dependent on individual families’ migration patterns, the mobile facility provides a degree of sustained contact with a formalized educational system. 

Expansion and Scaling
Early indications of successful intervention - alongside concerted and targeted coalition-building with the project’s partner NGO, the Freethinking Foundation, and Karnataka’s state Ministry of Women and Child Development (responsible for the administration of anganwadis) - enabled us to scale this project in the following months. Using the initial ‘Wonder on Wheels’ project as a pilot program, we have now signed a memorandum of understanding with the state government to fund, renovate and manage ten additional ‘Wonder on Wheels’ buses within the coming three years. Where the pilot ‘Wonder on Wheels’ program reaches approximately 50 children at anganwadis within Greater Bengaluru every day, the additional buses will, in sum, reach 550 children each day and create 161,700 individual student interactions with ‘Wonder on Wheels’ facilities during the academic year. 


Funding for this project was enabled through my receipt of a grant from the Davis Projects for Peace Foundation and additional fundraising.