Young people from underserved communities are especially vulnerable to the fallouts of poverty such as school drop-out and child labour. Magic Bus works to tackle these issues at the root. We are inspired by a future where young people thrive and we pursue this through our Childhood to Livelihood approach. The National Education Policy (2020) emphasizes socio-emotional learning and higher-order thinking skills for the holistic development of young people. With this in mind, we offer two distinct life skills anchored programmes: the Adolescent and Livelihood Programmes.
Through the Adolescent Programme we work with adolescents for their holistic development, help them overcome hurdles and equip them to complete secondary education. We teach them life skills in the way they understand through our activity-based curriculum. We also focus on Education Enhancement to improve their basic literacy and numeracy. Through our Community Engagement intervention, we work with multiple stakeholders from an adolescent’s ecosystem to build a network of support and uplift their community.
Through the Livelihood Programme, we enhance the employability of youth by imparting life skills and employability skills and connecting them to sustainable livelihood opportunities in white and grey-collar sectors. We provide youth with sector-specific training and job placements. As job retention is a key challenge for youth from underserved communities, we provide them with post-placement support in the form of mentoring and handholding through regular follow-ups. Our job placement sectors include Retail, BFSI, ITeS, Logistics and QSR.
Magic Bus emerged stronger from the pandemic, ready to take a leap towards our ambitious goals. In 2021, with the support of Dalberg and Bridgespan, we undertook a planning exercise to map our strategy for the next five years. We defined two distinct life-skills-anchored approaches for adolescents and youth. This is delivered through our best-in-class programmes that work towards achieving focused outcomes for school, work and life. This is how we will achieve our mission of equipping vulnerable young people to thrive in the transition to adulthood.