Nearly 13 million the world’s poorest people work in artesenal and small-scale mining and an estimated 100 million depend on it for their livelihood.

An estimated 1 million children work in small scale mining and quarrying around the world.

Mining and quarrying causes injuries/sickness for upto 15.9 percent of the economically active children (12.1% boys and 20.8% girls).

Africa

• Children are found working in mines West African countries, also in Tanzania and Zimbabwe
• Children mine gold, diamond, chrome and tin, as well as quarry stones.
• Sierra Leone is one of the diamond producing countries where economic interests was one of the driving forces behind the outrageous violence, which has become the norm. The USA, the UK, and Belgium-Luxembourg are the main destinations for diamond exports.

Asia

• Bonded labour, including child-bonded labour is widespread in quarries of granites and other stones in India. The United States imported $34 million of worked and un-worked stone, including granite and marble, from India in 1994.
• In 1992, the Philippines exported almost $2 million worth of non-monetary gold and approximately $16 million of gold and silver jewellery to the United States. The children reportedly earn between 40 and 50 pesos per day (approximately $1.62 to $2).

Latin America

• More than 9 million people depend on mining, most of them women and children.
• Of 400,000 people engaged in mining in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, 65,000 are children aged 5-17, while 135,000 are younger children who face the same fate.
• 20 to 50 percent of the workers are under the age of 18, with some reportedly as young as 11, in the Madre de Dios department in Peru, which forms over three-fourths of Peru's gold deposits.
• Peru is the world’s second-largest producer of silver, sixth-largest producer of gold and copper, and a significant source of the world’s zinc and lead. Mineral exports averaged around 50% of total earnings in 1998 to 2003.

In Guatemala, children work in the mining and refining of lime, a mineral compound used in the construction industry and the fermenting of local alcoholic beverages. According to a 1996 survey, children lift and crush heavy rocks. They are in constant danger of landslides and suffer from bone fractures, burns, and respiratory ailments. Children are also employed in stone quarries along the Samalá River in Retalhuleu, Guatemala. There, children, some as young as five years, chip and haul stones. Many are forced to work in order to pay off debts incurred by their parents. The work is both strenuous and dangerous. Children risk contracting various lung and skin diseases, loss of eyesight, and physical deformities or loss of a limb. Children frequently do not attend school and child illiteracy is common.

Children also quarry and cut stones in the Philippines. They have been observed blasting rocks, breaking up stones with pick axes, and carrying and loading stones into trucks, all without protective clothing.

In the Mererani tanzanite mines of Tanzania, young boys--called "snakeboys"-- compromise their physical and mental health by engaging in exhausting work in deep and weakly constructed pits. Respiratory problems due to dust and harmful gases are exacerbated by poor ventilation. Child miners endure loud noise and excessive heat. The boys place themselves at further risk by remaining in mine shafts far below ground while explosives are detonated in hope of being the first to recover newly exposed gems. In Tanzanian stone quarries, children work in bare feet, wielding crude hammers to break rocks. An unknown number of children also work in hazardous small-scale gold mining operations in several parts of the country.

In the stone quarries of Tamil Nadu, Indian children break stones into small pieces and carry tools and explosives. Accidents are frequent, as are reports of workers losing limbs and being killed. Outside New Delhi, in the stone quarries of Faridabad, thousands of migrants work, some bonded, and many assisted by their children. Working seven days a week under hazardous conditions, most children are unable to go to school.

In communities in south-central Peru, children help their families in informal gold mining operations. Most work as non-remunerated family workers, helping their parents with mining and household chores. They perform hard physical labour for many hours a day and walk long distances carrying heavy loads. Children who work in the mineshafts risk cave-ins and injuries from working with picks and other tools in the narrow shafts. Children who help process the gold using a quimbalete often come into direct contact with mercury. Studies done by NGOs at several of these mines found high levels of mercury in the children's systems. Psychological examinations found that 60 percent of children and 78 percent of adolescents tested below normal levels for intellectual performance.

In the gold mines of Issia, located in a difficult to reach forested area in the central-west region of Côte d'Ivoire, children work beside their parents. The average age of child workers is seven; the youngest may be three years old. Children are involved in all the major steps of mining including digging and breaking the soil, transporting, and cleaning the rocks. They leave for work at six in the morning and walk distances ranging from 5 to 11 kilometers through the dark forest to reach the mines. They work long hours in uncomfortable positions, are not given regular meals by their employers, and drink from contaminated water sources

In Zimbabwe, children are involved in the mining of gold, chrome and tin. Small operations hire persons to dig into the tunnels and entrances of mines abandoned by the subsidiaries of Zimbabwe's two major chrome companies. The owners of these mines often contract the actual mining work to subcontractors responsible for hiring labour, and these subcontractors sometimes hire children as employees. Children in Zimbabwe are also reported to work in chrome mining cooperatives where the `open cast' surface mining method is used. They do the actual digging, as well as the sorting of chrome from rubbish. In underground mines children allegedly lift mined material to the surface. Also in Zimbabwe, whole families, children included, pan for gold. With the world price of gold at approximately $350 per ounce, a panner can earn a livable income by netting two to three ounces per year.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, thousands people and children earn their living from digging with bare hands and simple shovels to extract ore- coltan mud mines of the eastern Congo. They live with the constant risk of exposure to toxic and radioactive substances. Moreover they run a high risk of being buried by a collapsing tunnel, security measures being almost non-existent. Coltan is fuelling Congo's civil war, the UN recently warned that this black eastern Congolese mud -- ($80 per kilo, refined into tantalum for cell phones and laptops) -- had already created a new African slave trade. The United Nations reports child labour in Africa has significantly increased in coltan and diamond mines. In some regions of the Congo, about 30 percent of schoolchildren are now forced to work in the mines.

About 140,000 children aged 5 to 14 have to work for a living in Nicaragua, and more than 27,000 are 9 or younger. In dim and dangerous tunnels lit only by the flicker of candles, children toil with rusty pick-axes to loosen chunks of rock they hope will yield at least a little bit of gold. Child miners suffer malnutrition and dehydration, kidney diseases, gashes and serious accidents in the scorching, gas-filled tunnels.