Despite decades of development progress, today there are still 600 million children living in absolute poverty and a billion children are deprived of the basic necessities of life. Kajal is one of them.

Kajal lives in an urban slum in northwest India.

There is no running water or sewerage where she lives, and she shares her home with pigs, stray dogs, cows and sheep. Garbage is everywhere you turn.

At 5 am, six days a week, Kajal gets up to collect rubbish on the city streets. When she gets home Kajal must cook and wash and then go out to collect firewood with her sister.When all those chores are done, she sorts through the day’s rubbish looking for things she can sell, like glass, plastic and metal.

Kajal usually earns 5 to 6 rupees (15 cents) a day, which is just enough to buy food for her family. If she doesn't work, her family doesn't eat.

Kajal's family is one of the poorest in the slum. After her mother died from TB, she had to leave school to work and take care of her younger brother and sister.

Kajal says she would love to go back to school, but in the slum where she lives almost everyone is illiterate and most people don't understand the importance of education. Only two boys in her entire neighbourhood go to school. The rest collect rubbish, just like Kajal.

Poverty like this means children like Kajal don't enjoy their basic human rights to adequate food and shelter, to grow up healthy and to go to school.

Through child sponsorship,World Vision is engaging Australians in the fight against extreme poverty so that children like Kajal can experience dignity, peace, justice and hope.