SMALL children are being forced to dig down into the ground with the most rudimentary tools until they find a seam of precious metal. Once they find that seam they then mine it and bring it to the surface in buckets or sacks.

They do all of this so that the people of the global North can continue to live in the manner to which we have become accustomed and already rich companies get even richer.

They do all of this if they are lucky enough to survive the collapse of the tiny mine shafts they have constructed. Even if they do survive with their limbs intact they are not deterred from going back to the mine because they have no choice.

These are young children who should be in school but their parents can’t afford the fees.

These young children can be found all over the global South, such as in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where the blood they shed is used to mine the cobalt that powers our mobile phones, laptops, electric cars, aircraft and, of course, much of the military-industrial complex.

In the DRC 7.6 million children aged 5-17 do not attend school and many are forced to become miners rather than learners.

Half of girls within the DRC in the same age group do not go to school thereby being condemned to a life in the mines, the home or the precarious informal economy.

The DRC government has had an official policy of free primary education since 2010 but the reality is somewhat different.

Direct costs, such as registration fees, still remain as do the indirect costs of school materials and uniforms. Poor households simply can’t afford even these costs on top of their food and fuel.

It might not be the forced labour inflicted on Africans of the past but poor families, whether men, women or children, are being given no choice but to find work wherever they can. 

The self appointed “masters of the world” from the rich nations are well aware of this but have continued to ruthlessly exploit the natural resources of the global South in the full knowledge that many of these precious metals are being mined by children.

The ruling elites of the likes of the United States, Britain and France, to name but a few, attempt to make onlookers believe that they have no knowledge that the most despicable form of child labour imaginable is being used to enable them to maintain their wealth and power while the people doing the work get poorer.

The exploitation is not a legacy of colonialism. It is a continued colonialism in Africa, Asia, many Pacific islands, as well as the ongoing exploitation of the indigenous communities of Australia and New Zealand.

It is aided and abetted by ruling elites in many of the regions who are propped up with the promise from the US et al of eye-watering levels of wealth at the expense of their own people.

Children, who should be in school or playing the games that children in the global North play, are mining uranium, cobalt, gold, silver and other precious metals at the same time as the planet is being destroyed by atmospheric, underground, and underwater nuclear testing, and nuclear waste dumping.

India is reported by Unicef to be the country with the highest number of child labourers but sub-Saharan Africa has the biggest problem overall.

Children of the global South, as we see in Palestine where thousands of kids have been murdered in plain sight, are treated in the same disposable way that the planet is being treated.

The seemingly never-ending desire to gather the materials needed to feed our lifestyles and to arm deadly nuclear weapons has resulted in the destruction of ecosystems and indigenous communities being forced off their land.

The only things that matter to the global elite are, as ever, accumulating enormous amounts of wealth and profits and enforcing it with economic or military power.

Indigenous communities across the globe have been exterminated. The Israeli genocide against the Palestinians is nothing new. One of the reasons that so many people in the global South support the Palestinians is because they recognise it from their first-hand experience. 

More than 10,000 children are thought to have been killed in Gaza. It’s not a secret. The whole world can see it thanks to the brave journalists who have stayed in the besieged area. 

The leaders of the global North, notably their self appointed leader the US, know exactly what is happening to the children of Gaza but refuse to intervene to stop the killing.

To them the children of the global South are clearly not worth the effort of saving.

They condemn hundreds of millions of children in the global South to extreme poverty with barely a second thought.

Unicef say that despite children making up one third of the global population they represent half of those struggling to survive on less than $2.15 (about £1.70) a day.

An estimated 333 million children, the vast majority in the global South, live in extreme poverty.

Lacking food, sanitation, shelter, health care and education they need to survive by going out to work at an early age to bring enough money through the door to help feed their families.

The world’s poorest children are twice as likely to die in their childhoods as wealthier kids. 

Obviously for those growing up in the midst of conflict situations, the risks of deprivation and death increase. 

Even in the world’s richest countries, one in seven children also live in poverty. Their political leaders would clearly rather wage war against other nations, directly or indirectly, than spend money to beat child poverty.

Only a limited number of governments have bothered to even make the elimination of child poverty a national priority.

The US, the richest country in the world, has the highest rate of child poverty among the rich nations, at more than 20 per cent, but still chose to spend around $800 billion (£640 billion) on its military in 2022.

While child poverty is a major crisis in the global North the children of the global South face a daily struggle to simply survive in a way that many of us in the richer nations can barely imagine.

Whilst there is no doubt that climate change, natural disasters and war are heavily responsible for the levels of child poverty, the indifference and greed of political leaders in the global North has also condemned children of the darker nations to a life of struggle and poverty.

As the leaders of the global North know all too well what the situation is but choose to do nothing, the onus falls on activists to build a movement that centres the desperate plight of children, particularly those in the global South.