Fighting Against Child Labour

The eyes of the children tell their stories.

Child labour, designation formerly applied to the practice of employing young children in factories, now used to denote the employment of minors generally, especially in work that may interfere with their education or endanger their health. Throughout the ages and in all cultures, children joined with their parents to work in the fields, in the marketplace, and around the home as soon as they were old enough to perform simple tasks. The use of child labour was not regarded a social problem until the introduction of the factory system.

In the early 21st century, child labour remains a serious problem in many parts of the world. Studies carried out in 1979, the International Year of the Child, show that more than 50 million children below the age of 15 were working in various jobs often under hazardous conditions. Many of these children live in under developed countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Their living conditions are crude and their chances for education minimal. The meager income they bring in, however, is necessary for the survival of their families. Frequently, these families lack the basic necessities of life sustaining food, decent clothing and shelter, and even water for bathing.

The most important efforts to eliminate child labour abuses throughout the world come from the International Labour Organization (ILO), founded in 1919 and now a special agency of the United Nations. The organization has introduced several child labour conventions among its members, including a minimum age of 16 years for admission to all work, a higher minimum age for specific types of employment, compulsory medical examinations, and regulation of night work. In the late 20th century the ILO added to this list the worst forms of child labour, including slavery, prostitution, debt bondage (the practice of requiring children to work off loans made to their parents), and forced military service.

CSA is working to prevent these issues successfully in the target area with the help other committed organisations.

Environment and Ecology

Floods are almost an everyday event.

Environment is all of the external factors affecting an organism. These factors may be other living organisms (biotic factors) or non-living variables (abiotic factors), such as water, soil, climate, light, and oxygen. All interacting biotic and abiotic factors together make up an ecosystem.

On the other hand, Ecology is the study of the relationship of plants and animals to their physical and biological environment. The physical environment includes light and heat or solar radiation, moisture, wind, oxygen, carbon dioxide, nutrients in soil, water, and atmosphere. The biological environment includes organisms of the same kind as well as other plants and animals.

For a better and sound environment and ecology, CSA wants to extend its programmes in every sector of the society. It would incorporate people from all strata to demonstrate social forestation in Sunamganj as well as the rest of the areas of Bangladesh.

Technical Cooperation

Technical cooperation is embedded in CSA’s name. The goal of technical cooperation is to enhance the capabilities of the people, organizations and institutional structures in the target areas. Technical cooperation means transferring knowledge and skills and mobilizing and improving the conditions for their use. Technical cooperation strengthens the individual initiative of the people so that they can improve their living conditions through their own efforts.

Financial Support for Small Entrepreneurs

The reality of Micro-Credit has helped many.

CSA will help both financially and technically (providing technological support) for small entrepreneurs primarily in Sunamganj. By entrepreneur, CSA identifies one who assumes the responsibility and the risk for a business operation with the expectation of making a profit.

The entrepreneur generally decides on the product, acquires the facilities, and brings together the labour force, capital, and production materials. CSA will provide special incentives for handicrafts, the making of decorative or functional objects, generally by hand.

Pottery, wood working, plastics, bread dough sculpting, knitting and crocheting, making cloth toys and dolls, flower crafts, shell crafts, candle making, decorative inlay and parquetry work with wood, stenciling, and making miniatures are the areas of handicrafts supported by CSA.

Sexually Transmitted Diseases

Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs), formerly known as venereal diseases, infectious diseases passed from one person to another primarily during sexual contact. Some STDs, such as gonorrhea, may cause no symptoms. People who do not know they are infected risk infecting their sexual partners and, in some cases, their unborn children. If left untreated, these diseases may cause debilitating pain or may destroy a woman’s ability to have children. Some STDs can be cured with a single dose of antibiotics, but many, such as Acquired ImmunoDeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), are incurable. People with these diseases remain infectious to others for their entire lives.

CSA wants to fights against sexually transmitted diseases. In this regard, CSA believes public awareness is the most effective tool to reduce these types of diseases. As a border district, Sunamganj is much more vulnerable to STDs. CSA takes programmes for identifying STDs of target areas and encourage local and national people to be careful about the disease. CSA would request for inclusion these problems in textbooks of national curriculum so that young people would be aware about sexually transmitted diseases especially about AIDS.

Rights for Ethnic groups

One of many ethnic groups in Bangladesh.

Usually ethnic groups are the original inhabitants of any region. These groups of people share their customs, language, and territory with each other. They lead a common cultural life. These groups are found almost in every country. Anthropologists stress the importance of kinship in ethnic groups. Usually such a group has a leader, a religion teaching that its entire people are descended from a common ancestor, and a common language and culture. Ethnic group is often small in size, is fairly limited in its contacts with other societies, and is correspondingly ethnocentric in its view of the world. Experts disagree about the relative importance of linguistic, political, and geographical boundaries for defining ethnic groups.

Ethic groups have traditionally lived as hunter-gatherers, collecting a variety of plant foods and hunting to obtain meat, hides, feathers, and other animal products. The land, its plant and animal life permeate every aspect of ethnic group’s culture and daily life, including their social relationships, economy, religious beliefs, and forms of art.

Today many ethnic groups live in poverty and many are unemployed. Many also have minimal, if any, education, sub-standard housing, and poor health. CSA is working with ethnic groups to increase social awareness among the members of the ethic groups about their civil and constitutional rights. Simultaneously, CSA is concerned about the rights of Ethnic groups. The most important areas of CSA about Ethnic groups are land rights and human rights.

Working on Women’s Rights

The rights of women is only lip service on many leaders.

Women’s Rights are rights that establish the same social, economic, and political status for women as for men. Women’s rights guarantee that women will not face discrimination on the basis of their sex. Although women in much of the world have gained significant legal rights, many people believe that women still do not have complete political, economic, and social equality with men. CSA is concerned with equal access to education and industrial training, equal wages for equal work, and a single standard of moral conduct for men and women. CSA highly emphasizes on women’s rights to the property, equal payment, civil rights, reproductive rights, etc.

Ensuring rights to decision making from family level to social level as well as to state level is another area of concern of CSA. CSA believes women must have right to access from local government to central government.

The UN encouraged equality in the workplace for men and women when it sponsored the Convention Concerning Equal Remuneration for Men and Women Workers for Work of Equal Value in 1953 and the Convention Concerning Discrimination in Respect of Employment and Occupation in 1960. Over 100 countries ratified these measures. Although various efforts, women are still the most vulnerable part of the society. CSA takes initiatives to formulate programs to boost women rights.

Health Issues

Vacinating the young against common diseases.

The severity of diseases in tropical areas is primarily due to widespread poverty and poor sanitation as well as climatic influences. Research reveals that only about 10 percent of the 80 million children in poor countries have been immunized against diphtheria, whooping cough, and tetanus, and such countries cannot afford to distribute drugs against tuberculosis or leprosy. Poverty is a condition that also leads to malnutrition, which makes people more susceptible to disease. Moreover, lack of awareness intensifies health problems more difficult and rampant.

Poor sanitation is especially to blame for the spread of cholera, in which the infecting agent is transmitted through contaminated sewage. Climate indirectly makes disease in tropical regions more severe by reducing agricultural production, which increases the risk of malnutrition. In a more direct way, hot weather and humid forests favor growth of the flies and mosquitoes that transmit malaria, yellow fever, trachoma, etc. Besides some diseases cause of acute sufferings for the dwellers of Sunamganj district.

For instance, DIARRHEA (the most common and incessant disease of Sunamganj. Diarrhea refers frequent passage of abnormally loose, watery stool), CHOLERA (a severe infectious disease endemic in Bangladesh and some other tropical countries and occasionally spreading to temperate climates. The symptoms of cholera are diarrhea and the loss of water and salts in the stool), MALARIA (a debilitating infectious disease characterized by chills, shaking, and periodic bouts of intense fever. Caused by single-celled parasites of the genus Plasmodium, malaria is transmitted from person to person by the bite of female mosquitoes), TUBERCULOSIS (a chronic or acute bacterial infection that primarily attacks the lungs, but which may also affect the kidneys, bones, lymph nodes, and brain), etc.

CSA is very much concerned about the existing diseases of Sunamganj. CSA believes a healthy group of people is the obligation for sustainable development. CSA takes measures for providing health facilities to the persons who are suffering.

Sanitation

A little clean water goes a long way.

Sanitation, measures to protect public health through proper solid waste disposal, sewage disposal, and cleanliness during food processing and preparation. Lack of proper sanitation is one of the basic problems in our country.

Millions of people are deprived of suitable sanitation. Therefore, people suffer from various types of dangerous and infectious diseases. Diarrhea, cholera, Hemorrhagic Fever, Hepatitis etc diseases transmitted due to improper sanitation.

CSA is committed to motivate the dwellers of Sunamganj to exercise proper sanitation. It designs elaborate programs for increasing social alertness about proper sanitation. It also distributes equipments related to sanitation among the inhabitants.

CSA believes an integrated program of Government Organisations and Non Government Organisations can only resolve this vital issue of Sunamganj.