By Ousmane Coulibaly, Operations Coordinator
In recent decades in Mali, the increasing rate of global warming has caused continuous climatic change characterized by drastic reduction in rainfall. Before, farming was the dominant way to make a living but this unexpected situation (poor rainfall) has hugely impacted on rural farmers’ incomes.
Uncertainties, famine and extreme poverty have reached many families in southern Mali. Some people have lost hope. In order to deal with drought issue and meet their household’s needs, many local farmers migrate to the artisanal gold mines. Artisanal mining has become an alternative way of survival strategies for local farmers.
Some parents encourage their children to give up schools and join them in mine and work in order to contribute to household finances. In the gold mine, there is a social and sexual division of work. While men and small boys dig pits and work underground with pick-axes, women and girls haul out buckets of the mined earth and wash the earth to find the gold.
Children are actively involved in all steps of mining exploitation. After their withdrawal from school, small girls are used to take care of babies, carry water, pull buckets from the pit (which is more than 70 meters deep) and carry earth in the mine. Girls as young as six years old work in the mines, first coming as infants on their mothers' backs and later working in the rivers and small water holes to sluice the earth and extract the gold.
Most children in the mines do not go to school. The children, as well as other workers, complain of illnesses like back problems and difficulty breathing or seeing as a result of the dust. Many women even use mercury and other chemicals for gold washing with their bare hands.
I did my research for school on the situation of children in these mines. One case that stuck in my mind is the case of two small girls, Salimatou and Sitan Bagayoko. Salimatou and Sintan are ten years old and both were withdrawn from schools by their parents. Instead of being in the classroom, they were hard at work in mining activities in Kemogola. During my fieldwork in 2016, I noticed that those girls were working hard every day, from sunrise to sundown. They were pulling hundred kilos of mud from the mine with buckets. They spent hours, weeks and months washing for gold, doing a very hard job coping with accidents, risks, hunger, injury, death and collapsing of pits.
Salimatou and Sitan were not alone. Other children were born, grew up in the gold mine, and were put to work in the mine as soon as they were able. The absence of government in the mining areas has increased social problems like the sex trade (prostitution for money, food and other goods), drug use, stealing, rape, and the illegal selling of medicine. All of these problems were very common in the mine. In the artisanal gold mine of Kemogola, the rate of illiteracy and early marriage are very high compared to other areas of Mali.
After my research, I was always wondering; what can kind of future do the community of Kamogola reserve for child education and safety?
This is part of what inspired me to come work at Mali Rising Foundation. After seeing the children working in the mines, I want to help children stay in school where they can learn and grow safely. I want to help young people build better lives for themselves through the power of education, so they can avoid the hard labor of the mines. My hope is that our work at Mali Rising offers children a brighter future than the future that awaits them at the mines.
Extreme poverty, made worse by climate change, forces some parents to send their children to work in the mines rather than to the safety of he classroom.
