Background

Child labour is a serious threat to humanitarian causes in Bangladesh. It is not just a question of few thousand, but of several tens of millions of children thought the world that are exploited at work. Child labour has been around since time immemorial but now it is major challenge of our time. There are 3.2 million children working as child labourers in Bangladesh, accounting for 7.5 percent of the total children aged 5-17 years, and 43 percent of the total economically active children. Al though 75 percent of the total child population aged 5-17 years attended school, only a quarter of child labour are found attending school (26 percent of child labour), highlighting their disadvantaged status relative to other children. Although child labour is now a global issue it is a main problem in developing countries. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (Article 32) and ILO‟s Minimum Age Convention, 1973 (No. 138) set out the objectives and the board policy framework for the action to be taken to eliminate child labour. But the practical situation is painful; the number of child labourers has been increasing alarming in developing countries. Bangladesh I also a contested terrain in this context.