Attaining MDG targets: Focus on children

Bangladesh has been performing well in attaining the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), of which reducing poverty and hunger, enrolling increased number of children with schools and reducing deaths of children below five years of age, are some. We are close to achieving some of the targets by the year 2015.  Urban poverty reduction rate during 2005 to 2010 was 14.6 per cent to 7.7 per cent. The rural poverty reduction rate was from 28.6 per cent in the year 2005 to 21.1 per cent in the year 2010, according to Household Income and Expenditure Survey of Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics of 2010.
Most of the people in Bangladesh still live in rural areas. Exodus of the rural population to urban locations is inevitable as it has been growing rapidly. According to World Bank Report 2007, Bangladesh is one of the fastest urbanising countries in the world.  Its urban population is growing at a rate of  6 per cent compared with 2.2 per cent of the population growth. The rural poor are being uprooted from their homesteads due to unemployment, landlessness, loss of shelters in natural disasters like river bank erosion, floods and cyclones. At the same time, many income opportunities in the both formal and informal sectors have been created in the last two decades to attract low-skill and unskilled male and female labourers.  A report of UNDP identified 44,804 poor settlements in the 29 cities of Bangladesh comprising 1,162971 households with an estimated five million poor people. Sixty per cent of the country's 35 million urban people live in the cities of Dhaka, Chittagong, Rajshahi and Sylhet alone. Dhaka is now considered the fastest growing city in the world. In each year .3 to .4 million rural migrants arrive in this city.
Most of the migrants are rural poor. They take shelter in the slums and the streets with attendant vulnerabilities. The estimated number of street children in Bangladesh is 445,226, of which 75 per cent live in Dhaka city. Of them 53 per cent are boys and 47 per cent girls.  Different studies show that slums and street children face physical or verbal abuse, abduction by child traffickers, injuries from machines, road accidents, blunt objects and burn.  Studies reveal that among 125 children, 18.4 per cent are arrested at least once, while 2.4 per cent for the third time.  They are arrested while attending, on rent, political meetings (20 per cent), as suspected sex workers (12.8 per cent), on charges of pick pocketing (12.8 per cent), thieving (38.5 per cent) etc.  A study has also found that 16.8 per cent children have had sexual experience -- money being the main reason for 33.3 per cent, influenced by circumstances in case of 42.9 per cent, and for both the reasons 23.8 per cent. These vulnerabilities of children become severe when they lose one of their parents. In this situation they are more likely to be trapped by the child traffickers. Many get engaged in crime and other delinquencies.   
Yet we have to work for attaining some MDGs beyond 2015, which were meant to be achieved within 2015. We can see a ray of hope in the darkness keeping in view even the poorest of the poor.  They have positively changed their behaviour towards development, such as — increased use of ring-slab latrines, reduced disparity of girls in primary enrollment, reduced pregnancy and keeping household size small and sending children to school. Shiree, a joint programme of DFID and Bangladesh government for economic empowerment of the poorest, regularly conduct quarterly surveys and collect life histories from its beneficiary households. In one of its surveys conducted from March to April, 2010, it found that school attendance increased from 78 per cent to 86 per cent and extreme poor households started to spend for child education.
What we need to do?  We have to look forward beyond 2015, as still there are more than six million extreme poor both in rural and urban areas. In our population, children below 18 years are more than one-third of the total, and almost 7 million children work as labourers to survive. The children of extreme poor households, who are in schools and who have already dropped from education, of both sexes, are more likely to be trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty. But available empirical research and experiences show that children, who have at least primary education, can contribute more to social development compared with those, who do not have this education.  Besides, if these children get scope of learning technical skills, in later life they can earn more and acquire better economic resilience.  Some NGOs, like Practical Action Bangladesh, have some vocational and technical skill-based programmes along with infrastructural development programmes for the poorest and displaced households. These vocational and technical skills can be learnt in six months. There is no need to have higher education, but only the willingness of parents and children to participate. This skill-based technical education can be learnt as co-curriculum of formal education, so that even if the students do not continue education, they will have a decent work or they may work part time for bearing their education cost or help their parents.  
The writer is coordinator PFP / Shiree, Practical Action Bangladesh.      [email protected]