IMPACT OF WOMEN EMPOWERMENT IN AGRICULTURE ON CHILD LABOUR IN NARSINGDI DISTRICT OF BANGLADESH

Abstract

One of the most effective strategies for reducing child labour is women empowerment. The key purpose of the present study is to investigate the impact of women empowerment through agriculture and reduction of child labour in some villages at Narsingdi district in Bangladesh. A pre-structured questionnaire was used to collect data through face to face interview from randomly selected sample size of 100 respondents from some villages. The logistic regression model is used here to assess the impact of women’s empowerment on child labour. The main findings indicated that about 98% respondents had child helping hand who don’t use to go to school, but after starting work of the women of that family the education, nutrition of the chlildren increases. Agriculture as well as livestock rearing was the main occupation among the respondents. Most of the respondents were found owner and labour of their work. Their main source of income provided from some occupation like- business, service, fish farming, livestock rearing, and day laboring. The respondents have overall good farming experience. Most of the respondents (99%) have Leadership quality and were able to make their own decision. The economic participation rate in family of the respondents was very high (100%), on the other hand they (18%) had little loan opportunities. The study suggests that there needs a lot of work for empowering women to eradicate child labour. Government and nongovernment organizations should take proper step to increase women empowerment as well as ensure women’s fundamental rights make their life easy and make them more empowered so that women can generate income and be provided with greater access to finance then families can be lifted out of poverty and children are more likely to stay in school. Because the additional income helps families to mitigate the need to rely on children for labour. As a result, it is apparent that as women empowerment rises the problem of child labour decreases