By Roger-Claude Liwanga, Special for CNN
Editor’s note: Roger-Claude Liwanga is a human rights lawyer from the Congo and visiting scholar at Boston University. He worked for The Carter Center as a legal consultant, where he developed a training module to train Congolese judges and prosecutors on the protection of children against trafficking for economic exploitation in the mines. He is also the co-founder and executive director of Promote Congo, and is currently directing and producing a short documentary,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], “Children of the Mines,” which will be launched shortly in Boston. He writes in his personal capacity.
While the world was celebrating the International Day Against Child Labor on June 12, children in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) were hard at work in the country’s artisanal mines. Out of two million people working in the DRC’s artisanal mines, 40 percent of them are children.
Six months ago, I met a boy I will call Lukoji in the mine washing site of Dilala near the DRC’s Kolwezi city.
When I first saw him,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], the seven-year- old was sifting and washing heterogenite, an ore rich in cobalt and copper minerals. He told me: “I began working in the mines when I was five”. He works along with his two brothers who are 12 and 13 years old.
Lukoji only works in the afternoon because he goes to school in the morning. Unlike him,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], his siblings are school dropouts and work all day in the mine from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. Lukoji’s brothers abandoned school because their unemployed parents were unable to pay the school fees for all of Lukoji’s siblings.
Seventy-five percent of children surveyed in the DRC’s artisanal mines are dropouts. The DRC’s Constitution guarantees a free elementary education; but this constitutional provision is ineffective and there are almost no schools in many of the remote mining areas,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych].
Lukoji’s story is common in the mining sites in DRC. I met many children like Lukoji, children who get involved in mining mostly due to poverty and the lack of alternate opportunities in mining regions.
Lukoji works together with his brothers to increase their profits. There are also children who work for middlemen, such as mine traders or mine owners. These middlemen supply children with tools and cash advances, and in exchange,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], they force children to sell them their minerals at very low prices. The children’s earnings range from $0.75 to $3 a day, which they use to buy food,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], clothes and shoes, or towards school fees.

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