Tanzania struggles to end child labour from the lure of gold

NYALIGONGO – Three years ago, 14-year-old Julius left his family near the lakeside city of Mwanza, Tanzania, to try his luck in mining gold.

Today, Julius is in no hurry to leave, despite having one of the riskiest jobs on a chaotic mine site – handling mercury each day with his bare hands.

“It’s good work. I’m paid well,” Julius, who only wanted to use his first name, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, wearing an orange T-shirt and skinny jeans coated red dirt.

Julius, now 17, said he has been working with mercury for three years – but no one had ever told him it was dangerous.

There are more than four million child labourers in Tanzania aged between 5 and 17, according to a government survey released last year in conjunction with the International Labour Organisation. That’s roughly a third of the country’s children.

More than three million are doing hazardous jobs, including at illegal mines like the one near Nyaligongo in northern Tanzania, where they are exposed to mercury, heavy dust, and work long shifts without safety gear.

The Tanzanian government is aware of the problem, but has struggled to keep children out of small, unlicensed mines.

Its laws do not allow children under 14 to work, and hazardous work is not permitted for children over 14. Tanzania has signed all major international conventions on child labour, and introduced its own laws to prevent the worst forms of child labour.

But not everyone knows of the child labour laws, including families and local officials.

Government workers tasked with enforcing the laws lack the staff and funds for inspections, let alone pursue prosecutions.

“In Tanzania, we have a good law and strategy to eliminate all kinds of child labour. But the problem here is: who is going to implement this at the local level?” asked Gerald Ng’ong’a, executive director of the Rafiki social development organisation (SDO), an NGO which works on child labour in northern Tanzania.

“Local officials don’t have enough information about the law, and how to protect children.”

The problem is especially hard to tackle in the informal sector, said Emma Gordon, senior Africa analyst at global risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft, which ranks Tanzania as the 55th most “at risk” country in its 2017 child labour index, published on Wednesday.

“The government’s focus is very much centred around large industrial projects, particularly foreign-owned businesses that would be able to pay fines if violations were discovered,” Gordon wrote in an email to the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

In Lake Victoria’s gold belt, where gold has been extracted since the 1890s, licensed and unlicensed small mines operate with major mining firms close by.

The scrappy “artisanal” mines provide a crucial source of income to people outside Tanzania’s cities, but like the mining site at Nyaligongo, many operate without government licences.

The majority of children working in gold mines are employed by individuals running these unlicensed mines, observers say.

They are among the most exploited of the mines’ workers, typically earning the equivalent of about 1 euro a day.

“Pit owners employ children because they’re cheap labour,” said Ng’ong’a.

Legal or not, the lure of the mines – and the harsh poverty of the farming communities around them – keep children coming.

Brothers Petromos and Mayalamos, who are 12 and 16, left their village outside Mwanza because they heard there was good money to be made at this mine.

“The work is difficult,” said Mayalamos. “But I can only leave this place once I’ve earned enough.”

The Nyaligongo village relies on gold to survive.

On the village’s main street, cramped shops sell vegetables, SIM cards, and lunch to off-duty miners. Middlemen purchase gold from miners to sell in the closest town, Kahama, where it is sold on in bigger cities like Mwanza and Dar es Salaam.

More than 8 000 people live in Nyaligongo, says Faustine Masasila, the village’s secretary and a mine site owner, and more are still arriving.

“There are people here who used to have very miserable lives,” Masasila said, walking through the buzzing market. “If you work hard, you are guaranteed prosperity.”

A poster on the school office wall is a testament to the number of children who leave to work when they are old enough. This year, in Class 1, there are 236 pupils aged six and seven, while in Class 7, there are only 40 pupils aged 13 and 14.

“I feel very frustrated when children leave and go to the mines, instead of going on to secondary school,” said Mabula Kafuku, the education officer for the ward. “They don’t even have enough knowledge to mine safely.”

Children dropping out of school is a nationwide problem in Tanzania, and a major impediment to the government’s aspiration to become a middle-income nation by 2025. A recent Human Rights Watch report found that in 2016, more than five million children aged between 7 and 17 were out of school across the country.

In an age of information overload, Sunrise is The Namibian’s morning briefing, delivered at 6h00 from Monday to Friday. It offers a curated rundown of the most important stories from the past 24 hours – occasionally with a light, witty touch. It’s an essential way to stay informed. Subscribe and join our newsletter community.