Lalli*, a 13-year-old girl from India, doesn't go to school. Instead, she works four hours a day in a mine and accompanies her mother to fetch water. Before and after, she does chores around the house, cooks food, or washes dishes. 

Around 138 million children work worldwide – almost 54 million, like Lalli, under dangerous conditions. The work of children and young people in so-called artisanal and small-scale mining has long been described as the "worst form of child labor." Children work in narrow underground shafts, digging pits, fetching water, and sifting mud for valuable minerals. The raw materials they extract end up in products we use every day: smartphones, cars, computers, cosmetics, and many other consumer goods.

Hope and challenge: The perspective of working children

What are the lives of working children and their communities like? How do they themselves view their situation? What jobs do they have to do? What would help them from their perspective? For the 2025 Child Labour Report, "Hope and Challenge: Children's Perspectives on Their Work and Life in Artisan Mining," Terre des Hommes investigated these questions and placed them within the current political and scientific context.

In Bolivia, India, and Zimbabwe, around 200 working children and teenagers between the ages of 8 and 18 told us about their lives and work in small-scale mining. Their responses reveal that the work is hard, often dangerous, and marked by hardship – yet many are proud to be able to support their families and learn new skills. Many reject blanket bans, as poverty forces them to work and alternatives are lacking. Instead, they demand significantly better working conditions, more protection and respect from adults, and access to education. 

Many children emphasized during our research that they can only finance their schooling with the income from their work. Therefore, we need realistic solutions that protect children and offer them opportunities

• Children, young people and their communities want socioeconomic support – poverty reduction, access to better, free public services and the opportunity to continue their education for as long as they wish.
• Working children are often against a ban on their work: On the contrary, they demand better regulation, support for better and safer working conditions, better wages and, above all, respect.
• In doing so, they join the calls for the formalization and regulation of both small-scale mining and other work by children and young people in general.

It is crucial that state authorities and institutions consistently enforce the ban on exploitative child labor.

At the international level, we call for the political enforcement of the EU Supply Chain Directive, so that companies are obligated to exercise human rights due diligence throughout their entire supply chain. This is particularly important because children, especially at the beginning of global supply chains, are often forced to work under dangerous conditions. 

Politics and businesses must ensure that exploitation is stopped and that children can support their families and continue their schooling or education, if at all, through light and harmless work.

To the report

The term artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) describes the extraction of mineral raw materials using simple means, mostly hand tools and with minimal use of machinery.

*Name changed