On the traffic-stricken streets of Dhaka, we all come across a scene that is too depressingly familiar: children moving like shadows between rickshaws and stalls. They never tell us their names, but we all know them. It’s that little boy, maybe nine or 10, who knocks on the car window with the gentle insistence and the practised smile of someone who has done this thousands of times. When the light turns green, he jogs alongside the car for a few steps before giving up. In seconds, he is at another window, rehearsing the gesture again. Or it could be the little girl who sits beside her mother on the pavement, making flower garlands, or the small boy who washes cups in tea stalls with his fingers chapped from hot water and detergent. All of them, from the second they perceived this world, were taught survival before they could even utter a full sentence.
These are not rare sights in Bangladesh. They take place within the daily texture of the city. It is baffling how normalised we all are to child labour, and sometimes, I wonder if we even notice them anymore. Over the years, through our reluctance to acknowledge them and their tenacity to live, these children tragically have become permanent features of our lives that we have learned to manoeuvre around, to ignore.
Recent surveys by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) and Unicef revealed that 9.2 percent of children aged between 5 and 17 are engaged in child labour, an increase of 1.2 million since 2019. Many of these children are engaged in hazardous sectors like mechanical garages, workshops, and leather factories. They are exposed to industrial fumes, long hours and death, as seen in the fatal factory fire in Mirpur last month. The study also found that lead poisoning, a silent predator, affects 38 percent of young children nationwide. In Dhaka, 65 percent of children are affected. The consequences of lead poisoning are irreversible: stunted cognitive development, reduced academic potential, and lifelong health problems.
One could go ahead and argue that part of the reason behind the normalisation of child labour is linked to our collective acceptance of poverty. According to estimates by Power and Participation Research Centre, poverty in Bangladesh has soared to 28 percent. More often than not, when poverty increases, so does the exploitation of children.
This opens up a debate on child labour in Bangladesh that is rather multifaceted and uncomfortable and the crux of it is rooted in affordability. Although social safety net allowances exist, they do not keep pace with the rising costs. As a result, poor families are often forced to choose labour over education for their children. In this circumstance, if the state cannot radically lift families out of poverty, demanding that children not work becomes just a strictly moralistic stance.
It’s not like the Bangladesh government has not taken any steps—it has ratified international conventions, drafted national plans, and proposed a Tk 25 billion programme to eliminate child labour and rehabilitate those children—but all of these stumble at the implementation stage. In 2023, the Bangladesh Department of Inspections for Factories and Establishments identified 3,459 child labour violations, but the lack of routine monitoring and enforcement of safety standards still claims the lives of children like 13-year-old Asma Akter or 14-year-old Mahira Akter and Abdul Alim. These teenagers were working in the garment factory, which was engulfed by an adjacent chemical warehouse fire last month in Mirpur.
The situation is worse for children working inside Export Processing Zones, as the government continues to obstruct unannounced inspections there. Moreover, enforcement remains nearly impossible in informal sectors, since the Labour Act of 2006 is primarily restricted to formal sectors. Sadly, the majority of child labourers are employed in the informal sector—small factories, workshops, street vending, home-based businesses and domestic work—which makes eliminating child labour by 2025 a fever dream.
Change in this area requires more than legislation. It requires a shift in belief and a culture that values children as children, not as miniature labourers. Strong social safety net programmes must be created so that families are not forced to rely on child labour income. Evidence from Latin America shows that well-targeted conditional cash transfers reduced child labour significantly in Brazil under its Child Labor Eradication Program (PETI). Similar programmes reduced child labour by nearly 20 percent in Honduras, while simultaneously improving school attendance and health outcomes. However, for such a programme to work in Bangladesh, inspections and interventions must reach the workshops, markets, and other places where exploitation hides in plain sight, as exemplified by India’s Bachpan Bachao Andolan, Brazil’s PETI after-school programmes, and Ecuador’s Working Boys’ Center.
On this World Children’s Day, perhaps the most honest thing we can do is not celebrate but pause. We need to call a spade a spade and recognise that the children we see working in our streets, in our factories, workshops and homes, were never given a choice. Let’s try to ensure they have that—a chance to live their childhood as children, not labourers.
