Slums and poverty  

Bangladesh cities are growing at a rapid pace. About one-fourth of the population, as per census of 2011, resides in urban areas. The most recent guesstimates say that urban population constitutes roughly one-third of the total population.  About 16 million people live in Dhaka alone and the number is projected to rise to 27 million by 2030. Dhaka is now considered to be the densest city in the world.

One of the main reasons of growth in urban slum population is rural-urban migration. A survey has found that the majority of slum-dwelling household heads in Sirajganj and Barisal had always lived in those cities whereas just 15 per cent of Dhaka slum-dwelling household heads were born in the capital. This indicates that four-fifths of the surveyed household heads living in Dhaka slums were migrants. However, half of them had lived there for more than 10 years. Dhaka slum people generally came from elsewhere in the city (48 per cent), rural areas (34 per cent) and other cities and towns (17 per cent).

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) reported in 1997 that 60 per cent of migrants in Dhaka city came from four of the 19 greater districts: Faridpur, Dhaka, Comilla and Barisal.

Most of the above-mentioned information (and the information to follow) come from a study undertaken by the World Food Programme (WFP) in collaboration with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). The observations and analyses come from a Report titled Food Insecurity and Undernutrition in the Urban Slums of Bangladesh based on two surveys in 2006 and 2013.  The follow-up study in 2013, with a fund from Spanish Government, revisited Dhaka, Sirajganj and Barisal slums with a focus on under-nutrition of women and children. The article will heavily draw on that report, may be without any sequential arrangements.

Urban-rural migration is the result of a combination of rural push factors such as poverty and family influence, and urban pull factors such as better economic opportunities, job availability and presence of migrant relatives. Earlier studies mostly found economic reasons for migration followed by river erosion, local-level conflicts but later studies (especially during 1990s) came up with additional factors such as economic shocks and natural disasters. In 2013, it was observed that about three-fourths of household heads in Dhaka and Barisal slums adduced their coming to cities to searching for employment. By contrast, in Sirajganj, the main reasons were reported to be loss of property due to river erosion and floods, and employment opportunities.

One important observation is that those who were staying for more than 10 years in the slums were more likely to be in the higher expenditure quintile. "This suggests that it may take migrant households a while to get established but that those who migrate most likely in search of work are better able to improve their economic wellbeing, while people who are born in urban slums are seemingly less able to dig themselves out of the cycle of poverty".

Households, headed by women, are found to be more food insecure by all indicators though they tend to provide their families with more kilocalories. Nearly 70 per cent of female-headed households reported that they worried about food sufficiency in the previous month compared to only half of male-headed households. Education levels are particularly pitiful with high school drop-out rates. Majority of migrants in slums never attended schools.

In the 2013 Bangladesh Slum Survey, 60 per cent of slum-dwellers reported that they had faced at least one type of shock in the preceding years compared to 37 per cent in 2006 study. This means that over time, the frequency and recurrence of shocks for slum-dwellers have increased.  The main shocks are economic such as price hike, loss of employment and salary and business failure. Whereas in 2006 study, households reported damage to houses, major illness of household members and loss of employment as shocks. In 2013 survey, households in all the three cities were affected by one specific shock - price hike, which affected one-third in Dhaka and Barisal and over 60 per cent in Sirajganj. Obviously, political unrest led to increase in prices. Besides that, political unrest also robbed households of jobs.

A major adaptation mechanism has been to increase income by sending young members to work. The urban workforce has a larger share of female workforce than in the rural workforce. Urban slums have three times more child labour than the national average  which leads to higher rates of drop-out from schools. The 2013 Bangladesh Slum Survey found that 22 per cent the urban slum-dwelling workforce was under-15 years old. "Sending children and adolescents out to work is likely to jeopardise their education, physical and emotional health and longer term personal and economic development. From a human capital perspective, it is a negative strategy".

"Overall, the 2013 Bangladesh Slum Survey findings suggest that the food security situation in the Dhaka slums has not materially improved over the intervening seven years. Half of slum households in Dhaka and nearly two-thirds in Barisal were consuming less than 2,122 kcal/capita/day. Slum households in Barisal and Sirajganj were directing nearly 60 per cent of their expenditures towards food….The food insecurity peaked during May and June 2013, suggesting that urban slum households are particularly vulnerable to shocks, including the volatile economic and political climate, which prevailed in Bangladesh during the first half of 2013." 

Worse still is the information that nearly half of all under-five children in the urban slums were stunted and 16 per cent were wasted. The proportion of women considered undernourished was also high.

The writer is a former Professor of Economics at the

Jahangirnagar University.

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