ACCEL Africa fights against child labour in Mali's gold mine

Issa, aged 15, comes from the village of Korokoto, in the Kayes region, Mali. This region of western Mali is renowned for being an El Dorado, home to an open-air Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining (ASGM) site where hundreds of miners work without protection in waters contaminated by chemicals. Among them, dozens of children, sometimes under 12 years old, as well as many little girls. Although child labour is illegal, it is tolerated here in plain sight.

Issa worked in this ASGM site. His task was to break up pieces of gold ore extracted from the bottom of the shafts by the miners. This work is backbreaking and exhausting; and Issa wasn't the only one to do it. Marie, a young 16-year-old gold miner, had stopped going to school. She spent her days washing the mud to find the right veins of gold. Marie worked in tandem with Abdoulaye, another teenager, who was digging an underground gallery several meters long. A little later, Abdoulaye returned to the surface with a container filled with ore, allowing Marie to begin her work, which consisted of spending hours washing the earth for gold residue. Like many other children, Marie had dropped out of school.

© ILO Mali

© ILO Mali

Other children also worked on the site, helping to pull buckets full of ore from the bottom of the shafts. Some purified the gold using toxic products, dangerous for their health. At the end of the day, Issa brought a handful of gold nuggets to a trader operating on the site, Sidy, who paid him around ten euros. Then, Sidy handed over the gold to the local chief, Moussa, who transported it to countries in the sub-region, such as Burkina Faso, Senegal and Togo.

Thanks to the intervention of the ACCEL Africa project, Issa, Marie, Abdoulaye, as well as 247 other adolescents were removed from gold panning sites. The mining areas of Kayes are full of enormous potential in terms of professions.

The elimination of child labour in targeted ASGM areas, through the identification, prevention, removal of children in a situation or at risk of child labour and support for their socio-professional reintegration, can only be a reality if communities and prevention and protection actors fully play their roles and responsibilities. To improve the involvement of local stakeholders in the implementation of the project, consultation frameworks (circle level) and monitoring committees (at the municipality level) were created. Throughout this process, gold miners’ cooperatives played a leading role. It is in this sense that the ACCEL program has provided support to gold panning cooperatives through actions aimed at eliminating child labour in gold panning sites, particularly in Korokoto.

Thanks to the ACCEL project, our cooperative was formalized in accordance with the OHADA uniform act, in addition our members were trained to the THINK COOP, MY COOP, STAR COOP tools, which helped to strengthen our skills in cooperative management. We also received training on the identification of child workers on gold panning sites!

Mahamadou Cissoko, President of the union of gold miners' cooperatives in the commune of Sadiola.

Benefiting from the national vocational training certificate, 50 high-performing young people were provided by the project with installation kits in accordance with their field of learning. Among these young people, Issa, Abdoulaye and Marie benefited from support with installation kits. By choosing sewing, Issa and Abdoulaye were not only motivated by the desire to leave the work they were doing in gold panning but also and above all to obtain a decent job which would allow them to support themselves and meet the needs of their population in Sadiola, as for Marie, she chose hairdressing.

© ILO Mali

© ILO Mali

In the future, the ACCEL Africa project will continue to consolidate its actions by strengthening the capacities of gold miners' cooperatives to eliminate child labour autonomously, and by strengthening partnerships with local governments, private companies and organizations of workers, ACCEL Africa aims to bring about lasting change, ensuring every child has access to education and professional development opportunities, thereby contributing to the economic and social development of the region.