Dhaka (AsiaNews) - Roni Roy is 12 years old and works as an assistant mechanic in Dhaka. Together with his parents and his three brothers he moved a year ago to the capital, because there was no work where they lived (Ronjpur district, northern Bangladesh). "At home we had nothing to eat - he tells AsiaNews - because we are very poor. So I started to work." Like Roni, about 7.4 million children in the country are forced to work because of hunger and poverty, the main causes of child labor according to the Bangladesh Child Right Forum. A phenomenon that is far from being eradicated, was recalled yesterday for the World Day Against Child Labor.
These children are between 5 and 10 years, often work up to 16 hours a day. Most of them - 80% - are employed in domestic activities: 17% of those are abused or tortured by their employers. This is the case of Fatama Begun, 14, who cooks, cleans the house, washes the clothes and accompanies the children of the family she works for to school, carrying their backpacks. "My mother died when I was 5 years old - she says - and my father remarried. I was abandoned and came to town in order to survive." She found a job, but her employers abuse her almost every day. "I cannot leave - she adds - because I need to eat."
The Bangladesh
government has promised to eliminate child labor by 2015, but data shows that
it is still an unattainable goal. Last year, the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimated that 8 million students
have dropped out of school and 44 million are illiterate. Bangladesh has a
population of 163.6 million people.
To stop this phenomenon since 2011 Caritas has been running a project called Aloghar
(House of Light), the goal of which is to increase the possibilities for the
study of the most disadvantaged children and multiply the minimum literacy
courses to make them more autonomous and integrated into society.