Sixty-four per cent children of Bangladesh are currently in a severe food crisis as the income of the country’s disadvantaged households, 86 per cent of the total, has completely stopped due to the COVID-19 pandemic, found a survey.
Save the Children, under Bangladesh’s child rights governance sector, conducted the survey on children between April 25 and May 5, said a press release on Tuesday.
The survey found that the food security situation in the disadvantaged households reached a critical level.
The survey collected data from 121 children of various communities aged 10–18 years asking 20 child-friendly questions over phone to understand the current situation during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Of the 121 children, 40 per cent were male and 60 per cent female and children with disabilities.
According to the children, 87 per cent of the families were not getting any support from the government or NGOs.
But disaster management and relief state minister Dr Md Enamur Rahman told New Age that the government allocated Tk 17 crore 54 lakh for 7.89 thousand children since the novel coronavirus outbreak started.
He said that the government would continue the support for children until the situation was over.
Save the Children said that the aim of the survey was unravelling the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the most marginalised children of Bangladesh and strengthen GO-NGO strategies and actions to minimise the adverse impact.
Twenty-two per cent of the children said that they had no masks and 23 per cent said that there was no soap in their house to wash their hands although public health experts asked people to wash hands to save them from coronavirus infection.
Child protection and child rights governance director of the international child rights organisation Abdulla Al-Mamun said that the crisis had far-reaching implications for children’s physical and psychosocial wellbeing.
The survey also found that 90 per cent of the children were not followed up from school, 91 per cent had no one to help them with their studies at home and 23 per cent were not studying at home at all.
