New reports show that 56 per­cent of Bangladeshi chil­dren live in poverty. UNICEF says that amounts to 33 mil­lion children.

The UNICEF study also has some unique ways of mea­sur­ing poverty. The report sep­a­rates needs such as san­i­ta­tion, shel­ter and nutri­tion into dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories. This helps to show how many chil­dren lack access to one par­tic­u­lar need.

From IRIN, we read more about the UNICEF study.

Over half of Bangladesh’s chil­dren are liv­ing in poverty and there is wide­spread depri­va­tion amongst them in the basic areas of food, san­i­ta­tion and shel­ter, with lim­ited abil­ity to escape their cir­cum­stances, accord­ing to experts.

A new report by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Bangladesh found that 33 mil­lion chil­dren under 18 — around 56 per­cent of the child pop­u­la­tion — are cur­rently liv­ing below the Inter­na­tional Poverty Line, defined as dis­pos­able income of US$1 per per­son per day.

Bangladesh has a pop­u­la­tion of 140 mil­lion; 63 mil­lion or 44 per­cent of the total pop­u­la­tion are children.

Launched on 25 Novem­ber, the UNICEF study on child poverty and dis­par­i­ties in Bangladesh was con­ducted by the Dhaka-based Human Devel­op­ment Research Cen­tre (HDRC), a research and pol­icy devel­op­ment organization.

It pro­posed a shift in the def­i­n­i­tion of poverty which moves away from a mea­sure­ment based only on house­hold income to also incor­po­rate income poverty, depri­va­tion and well-being.

“We have used seven indi­ca­tors to mea­sure the level of the depri­va­tion of chil­dren. These are shel­ter, san­i­ta­tion, water, infor­ma­tion, food, edu­ca­tion and health,” Abul Barkat, lead con­sul­tant for the HDRC study and pro­fes­sor of eco­nom­ics at Dhaka Uni­ver­sity, told IRIN.

This new approach presents a more holis­tic view of the sit­u­a­tion, he said.

The study showed that 64 per­cent of chil­dren are deprived of san­i­ta­tion, 57 per­cent are deprived of nutri­tion, 52 per­cent are deprived of infor­ma­tion. Forty-one per­cent are deprived of shel­ter, 16 per­cent are deprived of health­care and 8 per­cent are deprived of education.

The share of indige­nous house­holds with chil­dren suf­fer­ing from at least one depri­va­tion is con­sid­er­ably higher at 93 per­cent, com­pared to 58 per­cent of the major­ity Ben­gali households.

Bangladesh’s minor­ity indige­nous pop­u­la­tion is esti­mated to be around two mil­lion peo­ple or 1.5 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion, accord­ing to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

Few oppor­tu­ni­ties

“Chil­dren in Bangladeshi poor fam­i­lies face seri­ous hard­ships in terms of… depri­va­tion and vul­ner­a­bil­ity,” Nazma Quasem, vice-president of the Fam­ily Plan­ning Asso­ci­a­tion of Bangladesh (FPAB) and mem­ber of Bangladesh Children’s Rights Forum, told IRIN.

“These chil­dren grow up with extremely lim­ited scope for per­sonal growth and oppor­tu­nity to escape their cur­rent state of mis­ery,” she said

Quasem, a long-term children’s rights activist, pointed out that extreme poverty is also respon­si­ble for the pres­ence of child labour — one out of every six chil­dren is a work­ing child, accord­ing to UNICEF — and child abuse in Bangladesh.

“Social polar­iza­tion, increas­ing food prices, income inequal­ity, rapid urban­iza­tion, lack of land own­er­ship and the dev­as­tat­ing effects of nat­ural dis­as­ters like droughts, floods and cyclones — all con­tribute heav­ily towards the high lev­els of poverty in Bangladesh,” she said.

She also said the extent of poverty among chil­dren can be directly con­nected to the edu­ca­tional lev­els of the parents.

The UNICEF find­ings agree. Accord­ing to the report, 53 per­cent of house­holds headed by a per­son with­out edu­ca­tion lie below the poverty line, while only 19 per­cent of house­holds headed by per­sons of sec­ondary and above lev­els of edu­ca­tion face poverty.

Accord­ing to the agency, global child under­nu­tri­tion is con­cen­trated in just 24 coun­tries, with the top five being Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan.

A sep­a­rate UNICEF report on child and mater­nal nutri­tion released last month found 43 per­cent of chil­dren under five in Bangladesh, or 7.2 mil­lion chil­dren, are chron­i­cally undernourished.

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