"Kenya: Children descend into hard earth to dig for gold"

In a county in western Kenya, the gold trade is luring children to a bustling mining town where child labor is common, with children as young as eight working deep inside the hard earth in search of gold. Even as World Day Against Child Labor falls on Wednesday, children in the town of Migori dive deep into hundreds of tunnels lacking light, air, and warmth, the walls damp and musty, covered in moss and darkened by years of abuse. Only their footsteps can be heard echoing off the tunnel walls...Looking from above, one can see dozens of children adding water to basins in search of gold. These children rarely see the inside of a classroom, as they spend most of their days here, and in fact their parents, guardians, and the wider community supports their difficult labor.

“We’re very poor, we need money from wherever we can get it,” Mary Nseme from the nearby village of Nyatika told Anadolu Agency. “We know children aren’t supposed to work, but without them, we can’t eat, as most of us are old.” As June 12 marks World Day Against Child Labor, the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the European Union say that more than 1.9 million children in Kenya -- one of sub-Saharan Africa’s top five economies -- are working. Numerous reports show the numbers of Kenyan child numbers are growing as poverty rates rise, especially in rural and poor urban households.

A recent ILO fact sheet laments the millions of children age 5-17 working in Kenya, adding: “Only 3.2% of these children have attained a secondary school education and 12.7% have no formal schooling at all.” Speaking in Swahili, Diana Anyango told Anadolu Agency: “I started to do this work when I was 8 years, now I’m 14. I would love to go to school but my family says I have to work. I’m always in and out of school.”