Paper Title
Living Arrangement and Health Condition of Street Children in Bangladesh

Abstract
This paper is prepared on the basis of a study conducted in Sylhet City and focusing on living arrangement and health condition among street children. Today�s children are the future of to-morrow. Since they create the world of to-morrow, they are at the heart of social development. The future of a nation depends largely on how children prepare themselves to enter into the world of work. Children who are healthy, well-fed and educated grow up to be productive, innovative workers and responsible adults. But more than one billion children are condemned to poverty, without jobs, without basic necessities and without any hope. Among them many of are involved in different kind of economic activities for meeting their essential need and family as well. The emphasize has been given to reduce the proportion of child labor by many organizations like UNICEF, UNDP, Save the Children of UK, Australia and Sweden and so many NGOs in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, total number of children aged 5-14 years is about 35.06 million among which working children is approximately 5.05 million This situation impedes physical, mental and moral development of the child. Child abuse is closely related to the hindrance of social development of a nation. There is no mechanism for delivery of health services targeting the street children. Some organization have taken initiative for ensure essential services for disadvantaged group but street children don�t get any kind of social services. With the objective of investigating the living arrangement and health condition of street children focusing on the question whether street children get health facilities or not the study was conducted in Sylhet City of Bangladesh. By using qualitative approach of research and assessing the overall health status, health needs, health hazards and difficulties of getting health services of the street children, the case study method has been used for this study. The scope of the study were issues of health like living arrangement, nature of diseases that usually street children encountered and health seeking behavior of them. The Sylhet railway station was considered as area of the study. All the street children of this area are regarded as the population of the study. Among the street children living in an around the rail station, twenty (20) street children were purposively selected both from male and female within age group of 10-18. Purposive sampling method has been used for selecting sample. Unstructured interview schedule consisting with both open ended and close-ended questions had adopted for collecting data from the respondents. The street children have no permanent place to live and therefore usually pass night on the street itself. Children of the streets are being neglected and underprivileged group in our society. They may be a vulnerable and neglected group but they too possess the same feelings like other children and their needs for development would be higher if they get equal opportunities as other get. They are deprived from their human rights and opportunities what government provided for children. Though health is a basic need of people of all strata but street children are remained with proper professional health treatment and medicine. The findings may help both government and the community development organizations to undertake appropriate and need based interventions for providing health service of the Street Children. There is a need to look into them in terms of their health facilities and promoting health care system for achieving MGD which was target by 2015. Government and non-government intervention are very much essential in order to ensure and promote health facilities so that they can live and survive with a sound physical and mental health Keywords- Health, Children, Hygiene, Fever, Professional