The children of Krishi market, in Bangladesh, live on rice sweepings. Rosita Boland reports on how one charity is helping them and others

The smell emanating from Dhaka's covered Krishi rice market is overpoweringly strong. The odour is not the usual Asian market smells of decaying rubbish, pollution and human waste but that of jute. The air is dense with fibres from thousands of rice-filled jute sacks. The sacks are stacked to the roof, making the dim interior even dimmer. Loose rice crunches underfoot on the filthy floor.

For a minute or two the place looks like a huge, anonymous warehouse; then I see that the market is carefully divided into alcoves, each presided over by its male owner. Each alcove has a home-made scales, one of the low wooden structures that serve both as bench and bed in Asia, and a few personal items, such as tin dishes, flasks and trays.

At the far end of the market, in the darkest corner of all, is a ramshackle stairway blocked by junk. We have to squeeze past and wait for our eyes to adjust before ascending the dank stairs to the rooftop. I don't yet know why we've been brought here by Plan, the international child- focused development aid organisation, on this first of four days visiting some of its Bangladesh-based projects. Then the door swings open.

On the flat roof of the market are some 60 children between eight and 13 years old. They are sitting in rows on strips of carpet in two groups, boys and girls, in the shade of sheds on the roof, which give some protection from the searing heat of the city. Neat little stacks of books, copies and pencils stand in front of each child, and blackboards are propped against the shed walls.

The stacks seem the only orderliness in the chaos of the urban landscape - the stumps of half-finished breeze-block buildings that are nonetheless occupied, the broken roads, the sea of rubbish that flows along the streets, the electricity wires that coil dangerously and randomly everywhere. Even by Asian standards Dhaka is a grim city, terrifyingly overpopulated - up to 15 million people in an area no bigger than Dublin - with a correspondingly disastrous infrastructure and slums nobody can enumerate.

Many of the boys on the roof smile and jostle each other. When the teacher's eye is temporarily off them, they scamper further down the roof to pet a tethered monkey. There is some vestige of mischief, of play, about the boys, but most of the girls fold their hands into their dresses and look solemn. They smile for the camera, then their smiles fade, as if they are not used to smiling much. All of them look about four years younger than they are: recent surveys have shown that Bangladeshi children are so malnourished that they are smaller and thinner than their counterparts of 50 years ago.

They work in the rice market from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., seven days a week. They arrive at first light, to make tea for the men and to fetch their breakfasts. The rice market is owned and run exclusively by men, all of whom have homes elsewhere. The children run errands all day and keep the place tidy by sweeping up the rice that gets spilled when being weighed and bagged. The boys lift the sacks and carry them from place to place.

They are not paid for their work, but they are given any leftover food that the men they work for don't finish. They also get to keep and bring home whatever rice they have gleaned by sweeping it from the filthy floor. Most of the girls have at least one parent they go home to, but the boys work and live full time in the rice market, sleeping on the floor, where rats run freely. The boys' families are in villages far from Dhaka or in slums where conditions are so bad that living in the market is preferable.

For two years, Plan, in association with Dhaka's Assistance for Slum Dwellers (ASD), has been running a school on the roof for these children. For two hours a day, from 3 p.m. until 5 p.m., they are allowed time off by "their owners", as Shaida Begum, the programme manager, unconsciously describes them. The children are taught numbers, Bangla and some simple English. They also sing, play music and do art, activities they have requested. This two hours a day of learning is the only playtime they'll ever have. The teachers are provided by ASD and paid for and overseen by Plan, which also pays for the books and materials.

"I like singing," says Ruma, who is nine, shyly, formally standing up. "I want to learn how to read and write." She has no known family name; her father is dead. She has three sisters, one elder and two younger. She picks up the bundle of twigs each child has, then squats to show us how she sweeps up the rice. Containers to hold the rice are precious, closely guarded by each child. Ruma's is a dirty old Red Cow powdered-milk can that she brings out from its hiding place behind the blackboard and returns, carefully, after her demonstration.

"I came from a village," says Monir Hossen, a stick-thin, big-eyed 12-year-old boy who has been living in the rice market for two years. "My family lived in a slum in Dhaka, but now they have gone back to the village. I stayed here because my family are too poor to keep me." He grins widely. Clearly excited to be picked from the rest of the boys to talk to us, Monir is eager to please, and he answers my questions, but he looks at me in amazement when I ask if he gets scared at night, sleeping in the rice market. "No!" he laughs. There is no self-pity or sadness in his voice as he tells his story; Monir is 12 in years but much, much older in experience.

There is a more subtle agenda to the children's schooling: the teachers, who report back to Plan, also act as unofficial supervisors and counsellors; the children are encouraged to confide in them. "The girls are sometimes asked to massage their employers," says Muzammal Hoque of ASD. "Their employers get excited and . . . "

Sexual abuse by the men who run the market is unhappily common, although it has become less frequent with the schooling, as the children now have someone to report the abuse to. Sometimes, when a Plan contact or teacher speaks out, the children's owners are embarrassed into leaving them alone for a while. But there is no official system to take action in cases of abuse. I find myself unable to stop wondering if this is why the girls don't smile.

When the children turn 14 - the age when one is considered an adult in Bangladesh - they must leave the market. The boys go to work elsewhere; the luckier girls are married off. The Plan people discretely point out one child. Little Shanaj, her shining hair tied in peach ribbons, was taken off the street as an abandoned baby and is being raised by an "aunt". Shanaj does not know it yet, but when she leaves the rice market she will be sent to work as a prostitute.

There are no easy answers to Bangladesh's problems. With 120 million people, it is the world's most densely populated country. It is also one of the poorest. Neither Plan nor any other aid organisation can yet provide solutions for the thousands of children who face similar futures to that of Shanaj: Dhaka alone has 225,000 abandoned children. But aid must start somewhere. The two hours of schooling a day that Plan provides in such basic circumstances offers a small but vitally important project: if these children did not have it, they would have nothing at all to enliven and enrich their long, hard days.

Sadeka Akhter is standing under mango trees in her lovely village of Dhalodia, near Gazipur, an hour north of Dhaka. Chickens run about underfoot, bamboo rustles nearby and the lush rice paddies we walk through to get here are shoulder high, due for harvest in three weeks.

The 13-year-old is holding a well-thumbed blue notebook, which she usually keeps propped up beside plates and glasses on a shelf in her house. It is Sadeka's savings book. In 2001, Plan gave money to this village and 23 others in the area for a micro-finance project, to be administered like a credit union. Anybody over 15 can take out a loan to buy equipment for work or for personal use. They have to pay it back within a year, at 4 per cent interest.

Under-15s are encouraged to save the few taka that come their way. In Sadeka's village, 76 of its 400 children now have savings books. "My mother gave me 50 taka to start off," Sadeka explains. The first entry in her book is for June 26th, 2001; she has since saved 378 taka (€5.40).

There are four children in her family: an older sister and a younger sister and brother. Her father, like many other Bangladeshi men, is labouring in Saudi Arabia. He hasn't been home in two years, but he sends money back, and Sadeka's mother gives her a few taka from time to time. She doesn't want to say so in front of her male translator, but later I'm told she uses some of her savings to buy sanitary towels.

She is saving for her eventual marriage and hopes to reach 2,000 taka (€28.50), a sum that no longer seems as unattainable as it once did.

In the far north of Bangladesh, around Saidpur, close to the Indian and Nepalese borders, Plan runs several other projects. One is a community market-gardening project, which children are also involved in. The village of Balapara, with 735 households, is a pilot project that has been running for three years in conjunction with the Rural Improvement Foundation, a local non-governmental organisation (NGO). It has proved so successful that it is to be repeated in eight other local villages.

Flooded so often, the soil in Bangladesh is exceptionally fertile, as so much of it is pure silt - sandy and loamy. The area round Balapara was traditionally used for growing tobacco, which is a good cash crop but exhausts the soil. Few vegetables were grown. Plan put up money for saplings - trees help reduce soil erosion - and seeds; the NGO provided training for each family to plant and maintain a market garden.

Sumantho Bula, a 17-year-old, has been helping his mother garden since the project started. For two years, in their perfectly kept plot beside their mud house, they grew only vegetables; now they also have 40 lemon trees, as well as beans, aubergines, tamarind, spinach, melons and cauliflower. Sumantho's father is dead, now he and his mother work full time in the garden. "One of my jobs is to get the compost," he says. This is water hyacinth, found in local rivers but used as compost only since the beginning of the project. He carries it home on his back. The other form of compost is dung.

Sumantho has two younger brothers, and he is teaching them what he knows. Their jobs are watering and making sure the village animals are kept at bay, both by chasing them out and by regularly checking the fencing round the plot. He also knows how to raise beds and transplant seedlings, when produce is ready for harvest and exactly how much everything fetches at the local market, as he is the one who does the selling.

As is usual in Bangladeshi families, he doesn't get to keep any money himself; it all goes to his mother. "Lemons are one taka, two for a big one. Each of our trees gives about 100 lemons; one harvest."

He presents me with a huge lemon, straight off the tree, and it has the freshest, zingiest citrus tang I've ever inhaled. From depending almost exclusively on a rice and potato-based diet three years ago, this family, like the 734 others in the village, is now impressively self-sufficient. They keep what vegetables and fruit they need for themselves and sell the excess in the market beside their house. His own favourite produce from the garden is red spinach.

So does Sumantho do any cooking? When he hears this translated, he howls with laughter, as does the male translator. No, no, he squeals, cooking is women's work! No matter where you are in the world, it seems, some things remain constant.

Rosita Boland and Brenda Fitzsimons travelled to Bangladesh as guests of Plan

What Plan does

Plan is an international child-centred development organisation founded in Spain in 1937. It has aid programmes in 45 countries and offices in 16. The Irish office opened this autumn, with Jane Clare as its chairwoman. All projects are funded through its sponsor-a-child scheme, which benefits 1.2 million children. It costs €22 a month to sponsor a child, and the money goes directly to local communities. To sponsor a child telephone 1800-829829 or www.plan-ireland.org. For further information telephone 01-6392968