Plight of African child slaves forced into mines - for our mobile phones | Internationa... - 1 views
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African children are enslaved in lethal mines to power our love affair with the mobile phon
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The child miners of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) risk death to dig for a highly dangerous ore used in mobiles, laptops and games consoles.
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Coltan smuggling is big business throughout Africa and is a major source of income for warring militias
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The valuable ore is sold for £300 a kilo but the young slaves risking death to mine it get just £1.50 a week.
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s also blamed for birth defects in the areaswhere it is mined.
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"Children are essential to the process because they can get into smaller holes dug in the river beds."
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"I wonder how many times someone looks at their laptop or their cell phone and thinks, 'there is coltan mined by children in this product'.
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"The end users - the phone and computer companies - say they don't take anything from Congo but there are ways around that for the militia and the people selling it.
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Over 80 per cent of all coltan is mined from DRC, one of the world's poorest countries.
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More than four million children in Congo are not in school and a third of those under the age of five are underweight. Life expectancy is only 44 years and 80 per cent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day. The discovery of such a valuable resouce has led neighbouring states to plunder coltan from within Congo's borders.
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Coltan's journey from Congo to your mobile is a complicated one involving militias, arms dealers and finally big business in the west.
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Compaq, Dell, IBM, Nokia and Siemens.