70 Time May 9/May 16, 2022
y The Time The
sun sinks over the Bangladeshi capi-
tal of Dhaka, Rekha is struggling to sit
still. Twisting her plastic bangles, the
34-year-old mother of two checks her
phone to make sure she hasn’t missed a
call from her 12-year-old son, who was
due home 30 minutes earlier. Rekha
wanders outside to peer through the
front gate, anxiety sketched all over her
face. “This job is too dangerous,” she
says, frowning. “Every morning I say
goodbye and I pray, ‘Please Allah, send
him home tonight.’ ”
Rekha has cause to worry. In the 18
months since her elder son Rafi started
work in a local glass factory, he’s re-
turned home bruised and bleeding
more than once. One afternoon, he
severed the soft skin of his palm with
a sharp blade intended to slice a win-
dow pane. As blood soaked the child’s
T-shirt, he was rushed to the emergency
room by his employer—but nobody
called Rekha to let her know. “I feel bad
inside, like I am a bad mother,” she says.
“I know Rafi doesn’t want to work. He
wants to be at school.”
When authorities first shuttered
Bangladesh’s schools in March 2020,
nobody could have anticipated they
would remain closed for the following
18 months, in what would go on to be-
come one of the most restrictive school
closures in the world. Classes returned
on a rotating schedule in September
2021, but schools were closed for four
weeks over January and February amid
a COVID-19 surge driven by the Omi-
cron variant. Now, two years on from
the first lockdown, child- rights advo-
cates say tens of thousands of pupils
across the country have not returned to
school. The majority, they say, are boys
ages 12 and older who were pushed
into full-time work during the interim.
Rafi was once one of more than 1,100
students ages 5 to 17 who attended
Shantipur High School in Dhaka until
the government imposed its nationwide
lockdown in March 2020. In Septem-
ber 2021, the school’s staff heaved open
the metal gates that face a busy street
in central Dhaka and waited; teachers
poised in pressed shirts and blazers
waited for them to return, blackboards
still damp from a sponge.
But only 700 pupils appeared over
the following days, and numbers
haven’t increased in the months since.
By December, so many of the wooden
benches and desks were sitting empty
that the school started selling them off
as scrap material. Two-thirds of the
children missing from the classrooms
are adolescent boys. “They are the only
wage earners of their families now,”
says head teacher Biplab Kumar Saha.
Although it’s impossible to know ex-
actly how many children in Bangladesh
have started working since the start of
the pandemic, attendance figures for 20
schools across the country collated by
TIME reveal that boys accounted for at
least 59% of dropouts from March 2020
to November 2021, a gender imbalance
confirmed by data from the nonprofit
organization BRAC.
The growing crisis stirred
Bangladeshi authorities to ratify the
International Labour Organization’s
(ILO) Convention 138 on child labor
in March. They declared that no child
under the age of 14 should be employed
in any industry, and promised to
eradicate child labor in its entirety over
the next three years. But as household
incomes across the country plunged by
an average of 23% during the first 18
months of the pandemic, many parents
say they’re out of alternatives: unless
their son goes to work, his siblings won’t
be able to eat.
That wasn’t the case two years
ago. When the schools first shut,
Rafi’s parents were concerned about
their sons’ education—Rafi’s younger
brother is just 8—and joined with
other neighborhood families to find
a private tutor to teach a dozen of
the local children for an hour every
day. But as weeks passed and Bangla-
desh remained in lockdown, the
family’s financial situation quickly
deteriorated.
By the summer of 2020, Rekha’s
husband Tajul, a successful entrepre-
neur, had lost his clothing business and
started working two jobs— manning a
small roadside stall by day, before patrol-
ling a market as a security guard through
the night. The hours were long, and his
income still wasn’t enough to pay back
microcredit loans and cover rent. Debt
collectors began showing up at their
door, threatening Rekha, who suffers
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