Awareness raising for prevention & elimination of Child Labour for a Child Labour free zone through community mobilisation

Child labour is a global issue as each and every day almost in every corner of the world children are labouring in conditions that threaten their health, physical, mental, spiritual, and moral well-being and development. However, the situation is ruthless in many developing countries. In developing countries, the involvement of children in labour activities is associated with a range of driving forces. In Bangladesh like many other developing countries, socioeconomic realities such as household-level poverty and economic hardship, cultural practices such as gender inequality, inadequate educational opportunities, and natural calamities often forced children to engage in labour activities.

Although Bangladesh has made significant progress to eliminate child labour from the export-oriented readymade garment, there is still huge existence of child labour engaged in various hazardous work. Because of the socio-economic environment, child labour is widely accepted and very common in Bangladesh. Many families rely on the income generated by their children for survival, so child labour is often highly valued.

This project envisages the strengthened capacity of the local community, local government members, and other stakeholders to prevent and eliminate child labour and guide them to formal schooling.

The project strategy is to develop a comprehensive system of support and development for working children by the following objectives: –

1. Ensuring Universal primary education: Education for all – Ensuring every child is to be going to school and reduce/stop dropout for ensuring the elimination of child labour
2. To Strengthen the capacity building for Affiliates for prevention and elimination of Child Labour in the selected area
3. To create a positive environment to support the campaign of elimination of Child Labour through continuing and increasing awareness

Bangladesh Labour Welfare Foundation (BLF) and its associate organisation have been working for a long to build awareness for the prevention and elimination of child labour through non-formal schooling and Skill development training programmes and bridge the child worker to the formal school. Elimination of child labour programme is one of the most prioritised areas of BLF and the child labour free zone concept will give a large impact on the community. Although we are working for a long, an ‘area-based approach’ is motivating more to the local community to stop child labour and send every single child to school.

Through the project activities, we BLF were trying to strengthen the capacity of the local community, local government members, and other stakeholders to prevent and eliminate child labour and guide them to formal schooling.