In the distance, dozens of blurry figures. Women and children, scavenging to survive in a gutted economy. Day after day, they crunch across debris, some in rubber gumboots, others with their feet wrapped in plastic like sandwiches to shield them from the muck. Hands bare, faces unmasked, they rummage through the trash pile for whatever seems valuable, such as plastic bottles and metal bars that recycling companies in Lusaka, the capital, will buy. If they find baked beans or smoked sausages, it’s a welcome snack.
Zambia has long struggled with child labor
Luke is 13, a slender boy with an infectious smile. For months, he and his brothers — Thomas, 15, and Oswald, 17 — have joined their mother at the dump. (They asked that only their first names be used to avoid stigma.) The boys wear T-shirts, shorts, flip-flops — in days past, their play clothes — and, in the way children do, turn scavenging into a sort of treasure hunt.
A truck rumbles through the dreck. The brothers sprint to offload expired food and paper boxes, giggling and smiling as they fill the cloth sacks they carry on their backs. “I really want to go to school, but this job of scavenging is very tiring,” Luke says. Sweat dapples his face. He waves off buzzing flies. Before the pandemic, before the dump, he dreamed of becoming a soldier. “Even when I go to school, I don’t concentrate. I have stopped thinking of my future career for now.”
I really want to go to school, but this job of scavenging is very tiring.
Like many African countries, Zambia has long struggled with child labor, or work that can potentially harm children’s health or limit their education. Most child workers are unpaid agricultural help, fertilizing cotton fields, harvesting tobacco, smoking fish and singeing wood to make charcoal, often alongside family, according to a report by the United States Bureau of International Labor Affairs. Other children mine amethysts and emeralds, crush stones at quarries, and tidy homes. These are jobs of desperation. Their families may live on a financial precipice; the HIV epidemic may have killed their parents and left them with no other means of survival. By forgoing their education, they are more easily trapped in a generational cycle of poverty.
Effect of the pandemic
In 2005, nearly half of Zambians ages 7 to 14 were child laborers, according to a report by the Understanding Children’s Work program, which is affiliated with several United Nations agencies. A national effort to combat the problem, mainly by emphasizing access to education, eventually whittled that number to about 10% of children, a government report says. But as with so many social gains, the coronavirus scuttled that progress. Zambia’s economy was already teetering before the pandemic, in part because the price of copper, a major export, had tumbled; virus restrictions kneecapped nearly every other industry and sent inflation soaring. Meanwhile, …….
Source: https://worldcrunch.com/world-affairs/chronic-shyness-the-high-price-of-social-phobia