Freedom from Brick Kilns
Ending bonded labour
“He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives… to set at liberty those who are oppressed.”
Families are trapped in Pakistan’s brick kilns by a debt that was designed never to be repaid. We pay it off, get them out, and put their children in school.
The mechanism is called peshgi. A family takes an advance from a kiln owner — for a wedding, a funeral, an illness — and repays it by moulding bricks. The rate is set so the debt never clears. It grows. It passes to the children. Whole families are born into it, work their lives in it, and hand it on.
It has been illegal since 1992. The Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act abolished the system outright and extinguished every peshgi debt in the country. Three decades later, more than a million men, women and children still work in roughly 10,000 kilns in Punjab alone, and Pakistan holds the fourth-largest population in modern slavery of any nation on earth. Religious minorities are heavily over-represented among them.
Our work is unglamorous and specific: legal aid to establish that the debt is void, relief while a family gets on its feet, housing, and — the part that actually breaks the cycle — a school place for the children. A freed family whose children cannot read is one bad season away from the next advance.
The work, in pictures.
In practice.
Legal aid
Establishing in law what has been true since 1992: the peshgi debt is void.
Relief and rehabilitation
Immediate support, and proper housing away from the kiln.
School places for the children
The only intervention that stops the debt passing to the next generation.
This one has a price, and it is not abstract.
Sponsor a child, fund a water facility, or help buy a family out of a kiln. Tell us which and we will show you exactly where it goes.