Slums in Bangladesh

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).