Plight of Bangladeshi street children worsens as targets fail

May 6, 2006, 15:45 GMT

Dhaka - The plight of hundreds of thousands of street children in Bangladesh has worsened in the last five years as their numbers increase and efforts to rehabilitate them fall far short of targets, reports said Saturday.

A survey carried out by the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, an autonomous think tank, revealed that the number of street children across the country soared to 674,000 in 2005, up by over 244,000 from 2000.

The survey report made available to the media on Saturday also disclosed that the highest rise in the population of street children was recorded in the capital Dhaka which accounts for nearly 59 per cent of the homeless and abandoned juvenile population.

The government's Department of Social Services which has been monitoring the progress of a long term United Nations funded rehabilitation project for street children under 14 said the country had failed to reach the target at the end of the first phase of the programme (2001-2005).

'The target was to rehabilitate 50,000 rootless children in Dhaka but we managed to improve the situation of an estimated 32,000 children by December 2005,' said project coordinator Shakawat Ullah Chowdhury.

The project, which is extended to six divisional cities, is based on 12 components including non-formal education, legal aid, awareness building and counselling for the disadvantaged children growing up on the concrete pavements.

These children were exposed to prostitution, drug peddling and underworld crime as they struggled to survive amidst fear and violence, said Salma Ali, a woman lawyer who runs an advocacy programme for trafficked children from Bangladesh.

Analysts blamed the target failures on the political uncertainty and chaos facing the impoverished South Asian Muslim majority country.

Meanwhile, in a related development the International Labour Organization (ILO) in a report published Saturday claimed there were 4.7 million child workers in Bangladesh many employed in high risk jobs.

The ILO report quoting from government statistics said over 13 percent of the total population of children between the ages of five and 14 were engaged in child labour.