Education vs Labour: the Case of the Children of Extremely Poor Char Dwellers in Bangladesh

Abstract

With a quasi-experimental design, this paper investigates what happen to a child's education when a child of extremely poor household in Char area of Bangladesh is engaged in managing the asset transferred to them to improve their livelihood under an asset transfer or microcredit programme. Investigating the relationship among child labour, a child's school attendance and school dropout, the assumption was found to be accurate. A child of the treated group relative to the comparison group worked 1.62 hours more and attended to school 8.18 days less. The percentage changes of school dropout for both groups were 260% and 37.50% respectively. Each additional daily average working hour of a child reduced school attendance by 1.24 days. One extra hour of a child's daily average work was accountable to a 0.15 increase in the log-odds of school dropout. Hence it may well be said that a child's engagement in asset management had a negative bearing on a child's education. The treated group was more likely to suffer from this harmful effect than the comparison group. Although child labour is an unavoidable reality, awareness building and the stipend for promoting child education could be brought as integral elements in the programme design to minimize the negative effect on child education.