‘I need money for school’: the children forced to pan for gold in Zimbabwe

Covid has closed schools and caused economic collapse – now children are taking up the dangerous work of prospecting

Children as young as 10 used to cool themselves from the sweltering heat in the Odzi River on their way back from school in mineral-rich Marange, a village 90km south of Mutare in eastern Zimbabwe.

Now, with the public education system collapsing and the pandemic taking a wrecking ball to their parents’ economic opportunities, children are spending whole days at the river, panning for gold or fishing for an evening meal.

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Child labour doesn’t have to be exploitation – it gave me life skills | Elizabeth Sibale

Growing up in Africa taught me to be self-reliant and resilient. Putting children to work must be seen in local context

Aged eight, Tayambile would walk with her mother every day to fetch water. On her 2km return journey in 30C heat, she would carry 20 litres in an aluminium bucket on her head.

She would then help to pound maize in a mortar and prepare food for the family – typically fresh fish caught by her father on the lake.

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Chocolate industry slammed for failure to crack down on child labour

Children as young as five still exposed to hazardous work in countries including Ghana and Ivory Coast, report reveals

Nearly 20 years after the world’s major chocolate manufacturers pledged to abolish employment abuses, hazardous child labour remains rife in their supply chains, a new study finds.

Research from the University of Chicago finds that more than two-fifths (43%) of all children aged between five and 17 in cocoa-growing regions of Ghana and Ivory Coast – the world’s largest cocoa producers – are engaged in hazardous work.

In total, an estimated 1.5 million children work in cocoa production around the world, half of whom are found in these two west African nations alone. Hazardous work includes the use of sharp tools, working at night and exposure to agrochemical products, among other harmful activities.

The report, commissioned by the US Department of Labor, notes that the overall proportion of children working has gone up by 14 percentage points in the past decade. The increase is accompanied by a 62% rise in production over the same period.

The findings raise difficult questions for industry in particular. Back in 2001, big brands such as Nestlé, Mars and Hershey signed a cross-sector accord aimed at eliminating egregious child labour. Despite missing deadlines to deliver on their pledge in 2005, 2008 and 2010, they continue to insist that ending the illegal practice remains their top concern.

In response to the scathing report, US chocolate giant Mars reiterated that child labour has no place in cocoa production and said it had committed $1bn to help “fix a broken supply chain”.

Campaign groups dismiss such comments as a duplicitous smokescreen. Indeed, a lawsuit stating that international chocolate manufacturers knowingly profit from abuses against children is currently being heard in the US supreme court.

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Covid-19 prompts ‘enormous rise’ in demand for cheap child labour in India

Charities warn that seven months of the pandemic has set the country back decades on child exploitation

Over 70 children were crammed into a bus, heading from Bihar to a sweatshop in the Indian city of Rajasthan, when the authorities pulled it over. Among the faces half hidden behind colourful masks was 12-year-old Deepak Kumar.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, Kumar had been enrolled in grade four at the school in his small district of Gaya in the impoverished Indian state of Bihar. But when Covid-19 hit and the country went into lockdown, the school gates shut across India and have not opened since. With his parents, both daily wage labourers, unable to make money and put food on the table, last month Kumar was sent out to find work.

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Human rights activist ‘forced to flee DRC’ over child cobalt mining lawsuit

Landmark legal action against world’s biggest tech companies lead to death threats, says activist Auguste Mutombo

A Congolese human rights activist has said he was forced to flee the country with his family after being linked to a lawsuit accusing the world’s largest tech companies of being complicit in the deaths of children in cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

In December, the Guardian revealed that a group of families from DRC were launching landmark legal action against Apple, Google, Tesla, Microsoft and Dell. They claim they aided and abetted the deaths and injuries of their children, who were working in mines that they say were linked to the tech companies.

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Children as young as eight used to pick coffee beans for Starbucks

Nespresso also named in TV exposé of labour scandal in Guatemala

High street coffee shop giant Starbucks has been caught up in a child labour row after an investigation revealed that children under 13 were working on farms in Guatemala that supply the chain with its beans.

Channel 4’s Dispatches filmed the children working 40-hour weeks in gruelling conditions, picking coffee for a daily wage little more than the price of a latte. The beans are also supplied to Nespresso, owned by Nestlé. Last week, actor George Clooney, the advertising face of Nespresso, praised the investigation and said he was saddened by its findings.

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Trafficked children among 230 people rescued in Niger raid

Police discover trafficked minors coerced into exploitative work and men from Ghana who were recruited online and enslaved

Children as young as 10 were among more than 230 people rescued last month during a series of raids combating trafficking and forced labour in Niger.

Operation Sarraounia uncovered 46 children who had been sexually abused or forced to beg and hundreds of Ghanaian men who had been recruited online and then enslaved in the capital, Niamey, said Interpol, which provided assistance.

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George Clooney ‘saddened’ by alleged child labour on Nespresso coffee farms

Brand ambassador pledges ‘work will be done’ after children are filmed toiling on Guatemalan farms believed to supply company

George Clooney has said he is “surprised and saddened” by the alleged discovery of child labour on farms used by coffee giant Nespresso, the brand for which he has long served as ambassador.

The Oscar-winning actor and director, who during school holidays worked on his own family’s tobacco farm in Kentucky, vowed that “work will be done” to improve conditions after a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary, due to air next week, filmed children picking coffee beans and hauling sacks on six Guatemalan farms believed to supply Nespresso.

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‘Coal workers are orphans’: the children and slaves mining Pakistan’s coal

Injuries and fatalities are common among thousands of debt-bonded men and children toiling in one of the world’s harshest work environments

All photographs by Mashal Baloch

The spectre of death hovers over the coal mines of Balochistan. Under scorching skies, this turbulent south-west region of Pakistan is home to one of the world’s harshest work environments, where tens of thousands of men and children descend below the surface each day to dig up thousands of tonnes of coal.

The threats of underground explosions, methane gas poisoning, suffocation, or mine walls collapsing are omnipresent and there is barely a single worker across the state’s five massive commercial coal mines who has not been touched by the fatalities that are common here.

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Ferrero Rocher chocolates may be tainted by child labour

Ferrero says it has ‘zero tolerance’ for human rights abuses amid claims hazelnut pickers as young as 11 may be part of supply chain

The hazelnuts inside millions of Ferrero Rocher chocolates sold across Europe this Christmas may have been picked by children working in farms in Turkey, according to human rights campaigners.

Ferrero, the world’s third largest chocolate company, is struggling to address concerns that multiple farms where it sources hazelnuts for its chocolate products may use child labour.

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I saw the unbearable grief inflicted on families by cobalt mining. I pray for change

When Raphael turned 15, he started digging tunnels at the cobalt mine where he worked – two years later he was dead

Bisette sits before me, her face drawn with woe. Even though this is my second research trip to the cobalt provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I am ill-prepared for the torment I will witness. We thank Bisette for her courage, for we know she is fearful that even a rumour that she is speaking to us could result in brutal reprisals against her and her family. She inhales sharply and recounts a tale of unimaginable grief.

Raphael was born to Bisette’s sister, but after both his parents died when he was a baby, Bisette raised Raphael as her own son. She says he was a bright and cheerful child. Raphael loved to learn but, when he was 12 years old, the family could no longer afford the $6 (£4) a month required to send him to school. Instead, Bisette says Raphael did what most children in his village had to do: he went to work as a surface digger at a nearby industrial cobalt mine near Kolwezi.

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Apple and Google named in US lawsuit over Congolese child cobalt mining deaths

Dell, Microsoft and Tesla also among tech firms named in case brought by families of children killed or injured while mining in DRC

A landmark legal case has been launched against the world’s largest tech companies by Congolese families who say their children were killed or maimed while mining for cobalt used to power smartphones, laptops and electric cars, the Guardian can reveal.

Apple, Google, Dell, Microsoft and Tesla have been named as defendants in a lawsuit filed in Washington DC by human rights firm International Rights Advocates on behalf of 14 parents and children from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The lawsuit accuses the companies of aiding and abetting in the death and serious injury of children who they claim were working in cobalt mines in their supply chain.

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Children as young as five make up most of Madagascar’s mica mining workforce

Investigation finds thousands of children are scavenging in deadly conditions for mineral widely used by car and electronics firms

Children as young as five make up more than half the number of miners scavenging for mica in Madagascar, according to a leading child rights group.

A year-long investigation by Terre des Hommes Netherlands found that at least 11,000 children between the ages of five and 17 are employed in quarrying and processing the shimmery, heat-resistant mineral, which is used in everything from makeup to car paint and hugely prevalent in the automotive and electronics industry.

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$1 a week: the bitter poverty of child sugarcane workers in Zimbabwe

Children as young as seven are doing hazardous work for meagre sums on sugar plantations

The blistering sun beats mercilessly on the Mukwasine sugar plantations near Chiredzi, in south-east Zimbabwe. It is Sunday morning and the soothing sound of hymns reverberate from a nearby church.

For most of the children living near the estate, it is time for Sunday school and listening to Bible stories.

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Human rights in the tobacco fields of Malawi – in pictures

Photographer David Levene visited Malawi with Sarah Boseley, to document the impact of the tobacco industry on the wellbeing of the local farming communities whose livelihood depends on it. Human rights lawyers Leigh Day are working with Malawian translators and paralegals interviewing potential clients to join the watershed legal action against British American Tobacco

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The children labouring in Malawi’s fields for British American Tobacco

Lawyers argue that while farming families toil over backbreaking work in desperate poverty, BAT is reaping the rewards

Even Dickens did not describe harder toil. Life for the child of a tenant farmer who works the tobacco fields of Malawi is unimaginably arduous: up at 4am for several hours of labour with no breakfast, cutting into the earth with a heavy hoe.

School – if they go to school – is a brief respite. The first and often only meal of the day, maize porridge, is eaten when they get home, before more digging. Sleep is on the bare earth under a straw roof.

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BAT faces landmark legal case over Malawi families’ poverty wages

Exclusive: Lawyers seeking compensation in UK for child labourers and their parents

Human rights lawyers are preparing to bring a landmark case against British American Tobacco on behalf of hundreds of children and their families forced by poverty wages to work in conditions of gruelling hard labour in the fields of Malawi.

Leigh Day’s lawyers are seeking compensation for more than 350 child labourers and their parents in the high court in London, arguing that the British company is guilty of “unjust enrichment”. Leigh Day says it anticipates the number of child labourer claimants to rise as high as 15,000. While BAT claims it has told farmers not to use their children as unpaid labour, the lawyers say the families cannot afford to work their fields otherwise, because they receive so little money for their crop.

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‘It has altered me forever’: trauma of child domestic workers in Pakistan | Saba Karim Khan

Despite shocking reports of abuse and a social media outcry, there is little sign of stricter laws to protect children

Each night, after a 12-hour shift of domestic drudgery, Neelum, 11, and Pari, 13, leave their employer’s million-dollar mansion with its manicured lawns in Karachi’s glitzy Defence neighbourhood, and return to their servant lodgings. There they sleep on thin, termite-infested mattresses, under-nourished from their diet of leftovers.

Behind the glistening glass doors of the country’s most opulent neighbourhood, thousands of children work as maids and servants. Across Pakistan, an estimated 264,000 children are employed in such work, and claims of abuse by employers are commonplace. In January, 16-year-old maid Uzma Bibi was allegedly tortured and murdered by her employer in Lahore for helping herself to a small piece of meat. After tweets about her case went viral under the hashtag #justiceforUzma, three people, including her employer, were arrested and are now in custody awaiting trial.

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Progress on ending child labour stalls in countries supplying goods to west

China, India and Bangladesh among otherwise thriving countries failing to make headway on issue affecting 152 million minors

Progress towards ending child labour has stalled in the countries most likely to be supplying goods to the west, a study has found.

Despite high economic growth and big improvements in education and development, countries such as China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Cambodia have made little progress in tackling child labour.

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