The Domestic Market and its Relationship to the Worst Forms of Child Labour in Bangladesh’s Leather Industry

By A.K.M. Maksud, Sayma Sayed and Khandaker Reaz Hossain

The Child Labour: Action-Research-Innovation in South and South-Eastern Asia (CLARISSA) project in Bangladesh focused on the worst forms of child labour in the leather industry.1 From early in the project, it was clear that most of the children were working in small informal enterprises. As our interactions with enterprises evolved through interviews, workshops, and Action Research meetings, we learned that many of the enterprises hiring children in the worst forms of child labour were serving domestic markets. The CLARISSA team felt it was important to comprehensively test this new understanding with a survey of small enterprises in Hazaribagh, Hemayetpur, and Bhairab. Hazaribagh city is the traditional centre of leather production, with a large number of enterprises working in the informal economy; Hemayetpur is where the government relocated the tanneries, which were located in Hazaribagh until 2016; and Bhairab is a large hub for shoe manufacturers. These three locations have been central to the work of CLARISSA. 1 Each one is an important, but quite different, component of the leather industry, which contributes 4 per cent of Bangladesh’s total exports (0.5 per cent of the country’s total gross domestic product). A target has been set to increase export earnings from the sector to 425bn taka (US$5bn) by 2024, which would contribute 1 per cent to the total gross domestic product. In 2016, Bangladesh ranked eighth in the world for footwear production. More than 76 per cent of the total processed leather produced in 220 tanneries in Bangladesh was exported (Ministry of Industries 2019). Yet, the working assumption underpinning this survey was that while a significant proportion of the children will be working in informal enterprises that supply formally registered businesses, which in turn supply foreign markets, an even higher proportion will be in small enterprises serving domestic markets.

CLARISSA Research and Evidence Paper 15, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies 2024 34p.