Excerpt:
In Bauchi State’s mining communities, children as young as 10 abandon classrooms for mining sites. They toil alongside adults, extracting sand and breaking rocks under the scorching sun, hoping to scrape together enough for their families to survive. For these children, education is a distant dream distorted by the immediate demands of poverty….

Sulaiman, 12, under a scorching sun, carries a small bucket of sand on his head, balancing it carefully as he navigates the rough ground.

His face stained with filth and sweat, the young miner endures long hours under the hot sands and mud at Jirr mining site about 25 kilometres from Bauchi, the State capital.

His hands blistered from shovelling heavy loads of sand to extract monoxide with his aspirations buried beneath the weight of his family’s economic struggles. 

Like many others, Sulaiman’s parents, unable to make ends meet, withdrew him from Nadabo Primary School, seeing mining in their community as a lifeline in their fight against poverty.

The children miss out on education and face the risks of accidents, health hazards, and exploitation at the sites.

For many families in such communities, the immediate income outweighs the intangible benefits of education.

Here, in Jirr, children as young as 10 work in sand pits, shovelling and carrying loads under the scorching sun and soggy pits in some instances.

Like Sulaiman, Abdulrahman Musa, a 13-year-old boy, shared his daily routine with this reporter. “I used to go to school,” he said, his hands calloused from sand mining days.

“But my father said we need money to eat, so I had to stop. Now I work here almost every day,” he added…