There is something profoundly disturbing about a country that speaks proudly of economic growth, digital transformation and a rising middle class while children continue to sleep beneath flyovers, sell flowers at traffic lights, collect plastic from rubbish heaps and beg outside shopping centres. Bangladesh’s street children are not an unfortunate backdrop to urban life. They are a national failure that we have normalised.

Recent estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands of children in Bangladesh live or work on the streets, although the absence of a comprehensive, up-to-date national count itself exposes the weakness of the state’s response. A 2024 survey by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), conducted with UNICEF, found that around 3.54 million children aged 5–17 are engaged in child labour, with nearly 1.07 million involved in hazardous work. These figures do not represent street children alone, but they reveal the scale of the vulnerability from which many children end up on the streets.

The problem is not simply poverty. Poverty is often the entry point, but neglect, family breakdown, displacement, domestic violence, exploitation, addiction and the absence of effective social protection can turn temporary hardship into a permanent street existence.

And once a child is on the street, the risks multiply.

A child who should be in a classroom is instead exposed to traffic accidents, physical and sexual abuse, trafficking, forced labour, substance misuse and criminal exploitation. Girls face particularly grave risks. Children who sleep in railway stations, bus terminals, markets or under bridges have little meaningful protection from predators. Their vulnerability is not theoretical; it is built into the conditions in which they are forced to live.

Yet society has become disturbingly accustomed to them.

We see a child knocking on a car window at a traffic signal and lower the glass only when we want to give money. We see children scavenging through waste and regard it as part of the cityscape. We step over sleeping bodies on pavements and continue on our way. Charity may provide temporary relief, but charity cannot substitute for public policy.

The state must stop treating street children primarily as a problem of visibility and start treating them as a matter of rights, protection and human development.

Bangladesh has laws and policies designed to protect children. The Children Act 2013 provides a legal framework for child protection, while the National Child Policy and social safety-net programmes recognise the state’s responsibility towards vulnerable children. The problem is implementation. Too often, policies remain impressive on paper while children remain invisible in practice.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) generally does not use “street children” as a standalone statistical category. Instead, it addresses children living and/or working on the streets primarily through its work on child labour, hazardous work and the worst forms of child labour.

The ILO’s approach makes clear that street-connected children should not simply be treated as a problem of public order. Where their work is hazardous, exploitative or deprives them of education and development, it is fundamentally a child-labour and child-protection issue requiring state intervention.

A serious national strategy must begin with reliable data. Bangladesh cannot effectively protect a population it cannot properly identify and count. A nationwide, regularly updated database should establish where street-connected children are living, why they are there, whether they have families, whether they attend school and what form of protection they require. Such data must be handled with appropriate safeguards and used to deliver services—not to criminalise children.

The second priority must be family reintegration where it is safe and genuinely in the child’s best interests. Taking children off the streets for a few days and returning them to the same circumstances is not rehabilitation. Nor is simply transferring them from one institution to another.

Families living in extreme hardship need meaningful support: cash assistance, access to healthcare, schooling, housing support and livelihood opportunities. Preventing a child from entering street life is infinitely better than trying to rescue one after years of exploitation.

Education must be at the heart of the response. A child who has spent years on the streets cannot simply be told to sit in a conventional classroom from 8am to 2pm. Flexible learning, bridge courses, vocational education, meals and psychological support are needed to bring such children back into education. The objective should not merely be literacy; it should be to give children a realistic route towards a secure and dignified adulthood.

Dhaka and other major cities also need child-friendly public services that work beyond office hours. Outreach teams should be present at railway stations, terminals, markets and other known hotspots. Street-connected children should have access to safe shelters, medical care, counselling, legal assistance and emergency protection. Police, social workers, health professionals and local authorities must be trained to treat them as children first—not as nuisances, beggars or potential offenders.

There is also an uncomfortable truth that Bangladesh must confront: demand sustains exploitation.

Children do not independently decide to work long hours selling goods, carrying loads or begging. Adults benefit from their cheap labour and vulnerability. Businesses, transport operators, contractors and individuals who exploit children must face meaningful consequences. Enforcement against child labour cannot stop with raids and occasional arrests; it must reach the networks that profit from children’s deprivation.

The same applies to begging. Periodic drives to remove beggars from major roads may make a city appear cleaner, but they do not solve the problem. Children cannot be made invisible simply by moving them from one street to another. If authorities are serious, they must combine enforcement with rehabilitation, family support and alternative livelihoods.

Local government has a particularly important role. City corporations should maintain child-protection units capable of coordinating with the Department of Social Services, police, schools, hospitals and credible civil-society organisations. Public spaces should be mapped according to child-safety risks. Municipal planning must recognise that a child sleeping under a flyover is not merely a social statistic but evidence of a failure somewhere in the protection system.

The private sector, too, cannot wash its hands of responsibility. Companies that proudly advertise corporate social responsibility should invest in sustained child-protection programmes rather than one-off distributions of food or clothing. The same applies to media organisations and citizens. Street children should be represented with dignity, not reduced to sentimental images that generate temporary sympathy and then disappear from public attention.

Most importantly, Bangladesh must change the way it talks about these children.

They are not “street children” because the street is their natural home. They are children living or working on the streets because adults and institutions have failed to provide a safer alternative. The language matters because it changes the question. Instead of asking why these children are on the street, we should ask what failed before they got there—and why that failure was allowed to continue.

Bangladesh has demonstrated repeatedly that it can mobilise enormous resources when political will exists. It has expanded access to education, reduced extreme poverty over the long term and built social programmes reaching millions of households. The country therefore cannot credibly claim that the plight of street-connected children is beyond its capacity to address.

What is missing is sustained political attention.

Street children do not vote. They do not have powerful associations. They rarely appear in policy discussions. They cannot lobby ministers, influence budgets or demand accountability. That makes the responsibility of the state even greater.

A country should ultimately be judged not by how its wealthiest citizens live, nor by the height of its buildings, but by how it treats those with the least power.

Bangladesh’s street children have waited long enough. They need more than compassion at traffic lights and temporary shelter during winter. They need a functioning protection system, a place in school, access to healthcare, protection from exploitation and, above all, the certainty that the state considers their lives as valuable as those of any other child.

The pavement should never be a child’s address. Bangladesh must stop accepting it as one.