Child protection
India is home to one of the youngest populations in the world, with 431 million children under the age of 18. Ensuring every child has access to education, families have economic security, and communities offer safe environments, is what allows children to grow, develop, and reach their full potential.
KAWACH is a 10-year, multi-stakeholder programme working to create enabling environments for children to thrive, in close alignment with vulnerable communities, the government and civil society.
The opportunity
Every child in India has the potential to thrive: to grow up safe, educated, and equipped with the skills and opportunities to shape their own future. India's laws, policies and programmes already provide a strong framework to protect and empower children.
The opportunity now is to bring these efforts together: bringing government, child services, non-government organisations, communities, and funders together around a shared vision, so that no child is left behind and every child has a genuine pathway to opportunity.
Our approach
KAWACH is the British Asian Trust's 10-year national initiative working to make this happen, giving children the opportunity to grow, learn, and thrive in safer environments. All children deserve a happy and safe childhood and the opportunity to lead a dignified life safe from violence, exploitation, neglect, and discrimination.
We bring together families, communities, government, and civil society through a structured, four-stage model: Detect, Decide, Deliver, Drive, strengthening local action while building the systems needed to protect children at scale.
Our programme
KAWACH is currently present in 41 districts across seven states: Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Assam, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and Delhi. We work across districts, blocks, and Panchayats to strengthen child protection, build resilient communities, and create environments where children can thrive.
Our work complements and strengthens existing government priorities, including Mission Vatsalya, Mission Shakti, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
- Children's Agency — Building life skills, leadership and participation for adolescents aged 14–18, so that as they begin to believe in a future of opportunity, they are better protected from harm.
- Education — Keeping every child aged 6–14 enrolled, learning, and visible to the systems meant to protect them, since schools are often the first place a child's risk is noticed.
- Economic Resilience — Connecting families of at-risk children to vocational pathways, livelihoods, and social protection schemes, since economic security is one of the strongest safeguards for children against harm.
- Strengthening Systems for Child-Centred Development — Building the capacity of Panchayats and other critical child protection stakeholders across tiers of governance to identify vulnerabilities, use local data, and integrate child protection into planning and service delivery.
- Gender Equality — Working with communities to shift harmful norms, so girls have more room to decide their own future.
- Disaster Preparedness — Preparing communities in flood, drought and climate-change-affected areas before crisis strikes, since disruption is often when children go missing or drop out of school.
Impact and highlights (2025–2026)
- 450,000 children enrolled or re-enrolled into school
- 2,800 Village-level Child Welfare and Protection Committees operationalised
- 60,000 government officials engaged and leading child safety and wellbeing efforts
- 30,000 community members and frontline workers trained and actively engaged in protecting children
- $4.3 million in government funds unlocked
- 5 million households accessed livelihood, food and health security schemes
Key partnerships
In partnership with Karmayogi Bharat, KAWACH has launched a Child Protection Learning Series on India's national civil service learning platform, the first time child protection has been built into universal civil servant training at scale. It was developed with the Ministry of Women & Child Development and NCPCR and has already reached over 120,000 civil servants.
“I am committed to working with the British Asian Trust and its partners to achieve our joint vision of protecting children from harm and ensuring they have access to the same opportunities in the future as all of us.”
