Participatory Action Research on Children’s Exploitative Labour

This PhD will link up with a DFID-funded programme, ‘Tackling the drivers of child labour and modern slavery – a child-centred approach ’. The programme focusses on surfacing and counteracting the structural drivers of exploitative child work, including through participatory, collaborative interventions in Bangladesh. In essence, the aim is to respond to the lack of participation and politics in mainstream child labour policy-making by piloting innovative interventions and alternative, collaborative processes for arriving at them.

Dr Howard co-leads one of the programme’s workstreams, on Social Protection. The objective of this workstream is to design and test a social protection intervention that will increase children and their families’ freedom from hazardous and exploitative forms of work. The intervention will likely consist of a large-scale social experiment centring on cash transfers and a ‘cash plus’ component, which will provide additional support such as health insurance or facilitation for collective action.

Other workstreams within the programme focus on the use of Participatory Action Research to develop small-scale, localised and community-centred responses to labour exploitation. A third will conduct ground-up theorisation around concepts including freedom and exploitation, asking communities who are commonly labelled by international institutions as ‘unfree’ or ‘victims of child labour’ how they understand and define central concepts in the analysis of labour relations and where they draw the line between decent and indecent work.

The programme will take place in poor, marginalised urban communities in Dhaka whose primary livelihood options include what are defined as hazardous and worst forms of child work (for example, waste picking). It will be implemented by a core consortium comprising the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Terre des Hommes (TdH), ChildHope (CH), the Consortium for Street Children (CSC) and the Ethical Trade Initiative Trade Initiative (ETI).

Although there are multiple existing mini-projects within the wider programme, considerable scope exists for the successful applicant to propose and design their own project of research. Attentive supervision will be provided and options for cross-institutional supervision exist.

Anticipated start date: 30 September 2019