Child Equity Atlas - BIDS

Child Worker and the Sectors of Employment
Child Worker and the Sectors of Employment
4.0.0 Children’s involvement in work adversely
affects their rights to health, education,
protection and participation as well as limits
their opportunity to acquire the knowledge and
skills needed for gainful future employment,
often perpetuating the cycle of poverty. Pursuing
gainful economic activity by children keeps them
out of school and poses a big obstacle in the
achievement of universal primary education goal
(MDG-2) with equity for many countries, including
Bangladesh. Given the huge negative impact of
children’s involvement in work, Bangladesh has
been striving to cope with the high proportions of
working children and those who are out of school.
The commitment to reduce children’s involvement
in work and its socioeconomic consequences
is fully in line with national aspirations and laws
including the United Nations Convention on the
Rights of the Child (UNCRC), the International
Labour Organization (ILO) Convention No. 138 on
the minimum age for admission to employment,
1973 and Convention No. 182 on the Worst Forms
of Child Labour, 1999 17 .
4.0.1 From statistics by the Bangladesh Bureau
of Statistics (BBS) such as the Report on National
Child Labour Survey (2002-2003), the BBS/UNICEF
Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (2006) and the
ILO Baseline Survey on Child Domestic Labour in
Bangladesh (2006) the prevalence of child labor is
high and its consequences are enormous.
4.0.2 In this chapter, the situation of children
(10-14 years) who are out of school and involved
in paid work has been examined nationally
and spatially to pin down the locations where
17
http://www.un.org/en/globalissues/briefingpapers/childlabour/intlconvs.shtml
the practice is most prevalent. As mentioned
before, the term real child worker, in this Equity
Atlas refers to children (10-14 years old) who are
employed for the production of market and nonmarket
goods 18 not for household use or unpaid
household services and who are not in school. Two
specific indicators: the proportion of real child
worker (10-14 years old) and real child worker
(10-14 years old) by sectors (agriculture, industry
and service) have been taken into consideration
in this chapter.
4.1 The Real Child Worker
4.1.1 The proportion of real child worker (10-14
years old), who are out of school and employed
in Bangladesh, was at 6 per cent in 2011, a drop
of a little over 4 percentage points in the last
decade when the proportion of child workers was
10.5 per cent (2001).The proportion of workers is
higher among the boys (9.1 per cent) than girls
(2.6 per cent).
4.1.2 By geographic regions, the prevalence of
real child worker is higher in the urban areas (9.0
per cent) than in the rural areas (5.1 per cent).
The prevalence is not uniform throughout the
country, with some geographical areas showing
higher rates than others. By administrative
divisions, Dhaka and Sylhet have higher
proportions of real child worker at 8.0 per cent
and 7.5 per cent respectively while Khulna has
the lowest proportion (3.7 per cent) of children
working (Figure 4.1). As shown in Maps 4.1
and 4.2, significant differences also exist in the
rates between different districts and upazilas.
18
Production of market goods and services involves those
primarily intended for sale, and non-market goods primarily
for own final consumption.
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