Supporting Health, Education & Lifelong healthy habits: Towards Empowerment and Resilience (SHELTER): Tea Champions

The survival, health, education, and wellbeing of children have a strong and reciprocal link with long term community poverty, development, and resilience. Poverty and inability to have marketable skills from schooling leads to several long-term issues which repeat across generations in a vicious cycle. Tea plantation companies have employed a huge number of laborers. Literacy level among the community is only 46%, one of the lowest against Assam's 72% overall literacy rate mainly due to a very high dropout rate at the high school level. 

The Project is looking forward to responding the problems of school retention beyond middle school among the children of tea garden workers as a way to improve health in the long term . In every village 50 (ages 10-14) children will be organized – 10 such groups for a total of 500 children will benefit from this project. The project will support tutors hired from the local community to guide, mobilize and coordinate the children into after school tutoring, group learning and sports activities along with improving health literacy. This project is conducted in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (Anita Shet, Professor of International Health and Pediatrics), and the Center for Development initiatives (CDI), Guwahati, Assam, India (Sr.Lisa Elavunkal, Director).