This is what child labour looks like in a refugee camp in Uganda: "There are a lot of things to pay for"

Three children walk to the maize and sorghum fields in Palabek, northern Uganda.

As she twirls at her children and chives stone in a quarry in the Palabek refugee camp in northern Uganda, Helen Imoo, a 32-year-old woman, says: "They have to come and work with me. There are a lot of things to pay for and life in the settlement is often not easy at all." Her eldest son, 16, nods without saying anything. The little girl, 13 years old and somewhat more smiling than her brother, says: "I like to come and help my mother. She takes care of the school, the food... We need to be here." In the air floats the stone dust that rises from the rocks that the members of this family hit. And on the ground are piled up the pyramids of pebbles that the stonemasons place on the sidewalk of a dirt road for the trucks that circulate there, potential buyers, to see them. "It's hard work. My hands hurt, my back hurts, sometimes it's hard to breathe... But we can't do anything else," the mother adds.

Imoo hails from the eastern state of Equatoria, the southernmost region of South Sudan, a nation founded in 2011 and therefore the youngest in the world. But a bloody civil war that began in 2013 and ongoing clashes between government and rebel groups and also between different ethnicities have left nearly half of its population, some 11 million people, displaced within South Sudan or refugees in neighboring countries. The peace accords signed in 2018 are mostly respected only in Juba, the capital, and the fear of returning to abandoned homes remains latent. "We fled in 2017. They burned houses, shot innocent people... We decided to escape," says Imoo.

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They migrated and Uganda, south of South Sudan, was their host country. And the Palabek refugee camp, near the border and opened that same year, his new home. His case is no exception. At the beginning of this year, around 900,000 South Sudanese were still living in Uganda, the largest South Sudanese state. Of these, according to the latest UNHCR data, collected in June last year, almost 70,000 live in Palabek, 60% of them minors.

With the exception of the new refugees, whose recognized needs are greater, or those who run businesses prosperous enough to receive nothing, who are the fewest, the vast majority of people living in Palabek camp receive six kilos of maize, half a kilogram of beans and a handful of salt and cooking oil per month from UNHCR. Because it is insufficient, this pushes them to look for a job, an arduous task. Ubaldino Andrade, director of the Salesian Missions site, explains: "They come to a completely uninhabited place, isolated from the large populations of Uganda, where you can live, build a house, but not find a job. Many are waiting, doing nothing, unable to engage in any commercial or economic activity, because there is very little that can be done here." The missionary says that the countryside is like a constant experience of survival, that everything that can bring an income to a family is exploited, and that some are very hard jobs: chopping stone, producing charcoal, cutting down trees.

In Uganda, 58 per cent of children between the ages of 5 and 11 are engaged in a trade despite the fact that the law sets the minimum age for employment at 16

Imoo's young daughter says they can get up to 180,000 shillings a month (about 45 euros) from the quarry. And that she likes math and English. And that, in the future, she would like to become a nurse. A couple of miles away, another 13-year-old girl, M.K., sits waiting for buyers for the coal she, her siblings and her mother produce. They arrived in Palabek in 2021 from the same South Sudanese region as Joyce and her family. "My older brother and I go into the woods in the morning to cut down trees. When we have enough wood, we return home, where my mother waits, preparing the charcoal with the fire. Then we sell it." His profit: 12,000 shillings (about three euros) per day.

Poverty in Uganda makes the fight against child labour difficult. Here, 42% of the population, some 18 million people, must live on less than two euros a day, according to World Bank figures. The International Labour Organization (ILO) states in a report published in February of this year that, at the beginning of 2022, almost 40% of the country's minors (more than six million) worked, with some of the northern regions, where Palabek is located, leading the statistic. The highest level is reached among those aged 5 to 11 years, with 58% of them in employment. This is despite the fact that the minimum age to do so, according to the Children's Act of 2016, is 16 years old, 18 in the case of heavy trades. "They engage in work that is mentally, physically or socially dangerous and interferes with their schooling, undermines their potential and undermines the development of society," the ILO said in its brief.

No Schools

Among all trades, the ILO states that the agricultural sector employs the most children, often in subsistence farming. One example is O.B., a 12-year-old South Sudanese man on a dirt road with his cousin M.A. and his friend O.D., aged 11 and 12. All three carry hoes that do not exceed their height by a few centimeters. The first says that he arrived in the settlement in 2017 from the South Sudanese province of Eastern Equatoria and that he does not remember working in the fields. "Now we are going to clear the bushes to grow corn and sorghum. If we hurry, we can start planting in two days," he explains. He adds: "I'd rather work than go to school. This gives us food, some money to buy clothes..." His cousin interrupts: "Not me, I prefer to study. I want to be a doctor."

South Sudan is one of the countries with the lowest education statistics in the world. According to UNICEF's latest State of the World's Children report, 52% of boys between the ages of 15 and 24 and 53% of girls are illiterate. But if the situation is complicated in their place of origin, thousands of South Sudanese children find in Palabek an almost insurmountable barrier to fulfilling their dreams: the alarming lack of schools, especially at older ages. Ubaldino Andrade explains: "There are between 15 and 19 preschools here, 14 primary schools and only one secondary school. Some young people access it after walking a lot, up to 20 kilometers each way and another 20 kilometers back." This is one of the reasons to stop studying and start practicing a trade, no matter how hard it may be. A picture that is repeated throughout the continent: UNICEF estimates that, in sub-Saharan regions, at least one in four children works.

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