I’ve been stumbling across similar scenes in my travels in Africa and Asia for many years. I’ve seen children dressed in rags in Mongolia, competing with bulldozers for a tiny share of the gold in giant pits. I’ve watched villagers digging deep hazardous shafts for gold in the remote hills of northern Tanzania. I’ve seen adolescent girls scraping for flecks of gold in small pits under the burning sun of Burkina Faso.
Globally, the number of child miners is probably more than a million. Hazardous underage labour is banned in most countries, yet groups such as the International Labour Organization have struggled in vain to prohibit it. That United Nations agency launched a campaign against children working in mining in 2005, calling it one of the world’s worst forms of labour.
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