Every year, millions of orphans are forced into daily difficult situations. According to a recent UNICEF report, there are over 153 million orphans in the world today - that’s about half the population of the United States.
In India, 28-million children between the ages of 5-and-14 engage in child-labor, many of them orphans. While India has made encouraging progress in recent years to reduce the number of children forced to work instead of pursuing their education, orphaned girls remain particularly vulnerable because of the heavy load of domestic daily chores.
In addition to walking for miles under the scorching sun to attend school, each day these orphaned girls wash clothes, cook and fetch water from the village well. Due to this arduous hardship, many girls consider dropping out of school, relinquishing their education and giving-up on their dreams. Yet study after study reveals that education is the single greatest catalyst to breaking the cycle of poverty and abuses of human rights.
Without access to publicly funded school-buses, rural orphaned girls have to walk give or six miles a day to attend school. Over half of them drop out by the time they reach high school. I believe we can ensure that they have more time to complete their schoolwork and focus on their education by providing bicycles.