U.N. Spotlights Scandal of Child Miners

Te United Nations labor agency is spotlighting the problems of more than one million children around the world working as miners, often for small unregulated firms, in dangerous conditions in an attempt to help support their families.

“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 Labor Organization (ILO) says.

To draw attention to the issue, the U.N. held a World Day against Child Labor on Sunday.

In Africa, particularly in Sierra Leone, Angola, the Central African Republic and the DRC, children are often employed for a pittance in alluvial diamond operations.

The ILO says its International Program 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 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,” the ILO added.

The organization 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.

In one example, the remote gold mining community of Santa Filomena, Peru, went from employing 200,000 child miners to declaring itself “child labor-free” over a four-year period.

But more children are entering the mining and quarrying sector all over the world every day. While community projects can help child miners in direct and practical ways, only worldwide awareness of the problem can mobilize the international effort needed to end the practice for good, the ILO says.