Our Society

K.I.D.S. e.V. Cologne is a charitable organisation running since 1994 as private sponsor with voluntary commitment various projects. The voluntary supporters and the board members provide longterm experience in development cooperation globally. At the same time the Indian partner organisation the KIDS Society was founded. The KIDS society is located in Tirupur, a city between Coimbatore and Erode in the Indian State Tamilnadu. 

Tirupur or Truppur is the fith largest urban agglomeration in the Indian state Tamil Nadu. The city is located on the banks of Noyyal River.  Today Tirupur is a major textile and knit wear hub contributing to around 90% of total cotton knit wear exports from India. The development started around 1985 when factories producing knitwear for the European and US market were established and unskilled workers came with their families to Tirupur to find work.  In the founding years of our K.I.D.S. activities, there were approximately 20,000 up 25,000 child workers in that region. The family income was too low and therefore children had to work to contribute to the families’ livelihood, partially under exploitive conditions. K.I.D.S. wanted to take action against this situation. We and our contributors are convinced that access to education is the only chance for these children to overcome poverty and inequality. With our child-oriented school where equal treatment is practiced value, K.I.D.S. provides disadvantage children a chance.

Education and continuous learning are the main activities of KIDS e.V. The organisation in partnership with the KIDS Society is running Migros-Kids-School, a privately held school for children coming from a poor background that qualifies, accompanies and supervises children from day care centre to kinder garden and successfully to a recognised school qualification. This is our contribution to reduce child labor and poverty.

As per current (2017) estimate of the International Labour Organization (ILO)  152 Millionen girls and boys (almost every tenth child) are child workers, 73 million, work in hazardous child labor. Almost half of all 152 million children victims of child labor are aged 5-11 years.
Up to a fourth of all hazardous child labor (19 million) is done by children less than 12 years old.