40K takes on joint venture projects within developing communities to alleviate extreme poverty.

Our maiden project is working with our local partner, the Lovedale Foundation, to build a bridging school to benefit the children of the exploited quarry workers in the rural slums around Bangalore.

The bridging school will accommodate up to 150 children at a time and will provide remedial education to bring them up to speed with the eventual aim of being supported through the main stream local education system. The school will also have a boarding facility to house the 30 children currently looked after by the Lovedale Foundation.

We see the major problem in the local area as the poor conditions of work and pay in the local quarries which provide jobs for the majority of the local community. The workers use dangerous and primitive techniques to break rock 12 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week. The daily wage is only the equivalent of $1.80 a day. Many of the local quarries have issues with bonded and child labour – both practices which have been made illegal but are unfortunately still prevalent. Even those quarries that are within the law have little health and safety and accidents are common. Many of the workers suffer from alcohol addiction and the quality of life is very poor.

40K is seeking to find out as much as possible about these problems so that we can roll out effective solutions that will leverage real change. We are spending time researching fully to ensure that we design effective solutions that will make real change to these peoples’ lives.

The bridging school will be finished in late 2010 so in the near future we will be focussing our efforts on training up the teachers in the accelerated learning techniques, starting adult literacy programmes, building satellite education centres to maximise our geographical reach and organising health outreach services, all using the bridging school as a hub for the various services.