April 26, 2022
Tens of thousands of boys in Bangladesh were forced into work during the pandemic. Now school is resuming without them.
Because of the economic crisis caused by COVID-19, tens of thousands of young boys in Bangladesh had to leave school to work.
BY CORINNE REDFERN AND ALI AHSAN
Below is an excerpt of a piece originally published in TIME.
While it’s impossible to know exactly 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.