This Sunday is World Day Against Child Labor, and the UN wants to spotlight the 1,000,000+ children working in mines around the world. Child miners perform heavy physical labor in unsafe and unsanitary conditions. They risk injury or death from the awkward, heavy loads and the instability of underground structures. They risk illness from the chemicals used in mining and the exposure to the elements.
Mines are often located in remote areas without schools, legal services, or social services. The harsh boom-or-bust conditions lead child miners into prostitution and drug and alcohol abuse.
“Because the money they earn is crucial to ensuring that they and their families survive, many are unable to attend school at all. These children are digging for survival,” the UN International Labour Organization (ILO) says.
“Underground, they endure stifling heat and darkness, set explosives for underground blasts, and crawl or swim through dangerous, unstable tunnels. Above ground, they dive into rivers in search of minerals, or may dig sand, rock and dirt and spend hours pounding rocks into gravel using heavy, oversized tools made for adults,” it adds.
The UN’s International Labour Organization’s International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) is working to ensure that no child has to toil in a quarry or mine.
“Pilot projects undertaken by ILO/IPEC in Mongolia, Tanzania, Niger and the Andean countries of South America have shown that the best way to assist child miners is to work with the children’s own communities,” ILO adds.
ILO says it has helped mining and quarrying communities to organize cooperatives and improve productivity by acquiring the machinery that reduces or eliminates the need for children to risk their lives. Such communities have also obtained legal protections and developed health clinics, schools and sanitation systems.
Over a four-year period, the remote gold mining community of Santa Filomena, Peru, went from employing to 200,000 child miners to declaring itself “child labour-free,” it says, adding that ILO helped the community develop new income-generating projects for adults.