Saima Sultana Jaba, Dhaka Community Manager
Shubbo, an eleven-year-old boy from Dhaka, welds car parts for a living. Too young and skinny to carry parts, Shubbo carries out one of the most risky and demanding tasks while his boss sips tea. He works from morning until late at night, and earns less than a dollar a day.
According to the International Labor Organization, there are 3.2 million children between the ages of 5 and 17 working in Bangladesh. Child labor has already received considerable attention in Bangladesh because of working children’s lack of access to education, leisure, and play, and increased risk of trafficking, abuse, violence, and exploitation.
To eliminate the incidence of child labor, the government of Bangladesh has accorded a prominent place to children’s rights in its national development agenda, and has undertaken a number of initiatives and policy measures. The Compulsory Primary Education Act of 1990 made the enrollment and attendance of primary education free and mandatory for all children. The government also targets vulnerable children, especially urban, working children, and attempts to cater to their educational needs free of cost. Although primary education is free, indirect costs such as transport, uniforms, and school supplies are not, which is why many children must work to be able to afford the additional expenses of school.
In 2006, the government enacted the Labor Act, which includes a chapter on child labor. This new law prohibits the employment of children under 14 years of age, and prohibits hazardous forms of child labor for persons under the age of 18. Although the current policy attempts to promote human rights, often it fails to establish social justice and to emphasize education, especially to urban slum communities, and it does not provide a strong enforcement mechanism for the child labor provisions. Limited access to government primary schools in the poorest urban slum areas is a large part of this issue. UNICEF Bangladesh recently released a report that urban slum areas have the worst performance regarding children’s well-being and access to basic services compared to rural and non-slum urban areas. In poor urban areas, school attendance is 20 percent lower than in rural areas.
The remarkable “Basic Education for Hard to Reach Urban Children Project” has helped 200,000 working children aged between 8-14 years old with access to education. This project, funded by UNICEF, SISA, DFID, and the government of Bangladesh, provides two hours of non-formal basic education a day to child laborers. Because it would have been impossible to abolish child labor completely from the start, the project adopted a “learn and earn” approach, where parents and employers were persuaded to let the child go to school for just two hours a day, and continue their work responsibilities the rest of the day. Not only does this project provide access to education and recreation for working children, it also provokes greater awareness of the rights of children in Dhaka.
The government’s laws and the “Basic Education for Hard to Reach Urban Children Project” are a good start to fighting child labor, but much remains to be done. The government should provide stipends or subsidies so that children can afford the indirect cost of schooling, and should also enforce laws, monitor actions, and create awareness about the adverse effect of child labor through media campaigns.
Photo credit: Child Labor of Bangladesh