The Blossom Bus in India bridges the chasm between parents’ legitimate concerns for their daughter’s safety and a girls right to education. By providing pioneering families with a bus and a parent chaperone to safely deliver their daughters to secondary school, the program helps delay the traditional institution of childhood marriage and early childbearing.

The scarcity of secondary schools, combined with conservative local attitudes toward female mobility, has terrible consequences for an adolescent girl in Mewat, India. Allowing a girl to travel alone is widely believed to be imprudent and therefore girls typically drop out of school at the end of primary school because few villages have their own secondary school.

Giving these girls the chance to develop a sense of autonomy before motherhood increases their capacity for social participation and leadership and reduces the likelihood of them working in the fields or at home.