In the mining pits of limestone and marble and in other cases Gold in Moroto district, pain is cutting little young children sharp and deep. Every tenet of the convention on the rights of the child is being violated from the children’s rights to Education, health and development to protection from exploitation and harm. 
The adverse climatic conditions in Moroto district in Karamoja region, North-Eastern Uganda allow only one crop cycle per year. These crops are only sorghum, millet and groundnuts. These few crops are highly susceptible to erratic rainfall of Karamoja region. The short rains often result in extremely poor harvests. The impacts of harvest failure fall directly on the shoulders of critically vulnerable young children. The people are semi-nomadic and agro-pastoral who normally experience severe food shortages because of drought, floods, poor infrastructure and cattle raiding.

As a result, some of the families use wild fruits such as wild berries and bitter leaves for food. Some families reduce their food intake to one meal per day which meal is too inadequate. Consequently, very poor and desperately hungry children who have hardly launched out in life have turned to very dangerous and hazardous artisanal mining in the mining pits and sites of limestone, marble and gold to survive with very severe and devastating consequences.
As a result of extreme hunger, desperately hungry children who totter on the brinks of starvation have resorted to the most devastating damaging artisanal child mining to eke out a dismal survival but the suffering and pain these little young children are undergoing and enduring is beyond description.
Little young children lift locally made heavy tools such as hammers, iron rods and pick axes which one designed for adults and too burdening beyond these children’s age and abilities. The children talk of scorching chest pains and back aches. Exposure to too much dust clouds of dust while mining makes the children suffer from acute respiratory infections.

These vulnerable children’s bare feet and frail hands often get pricked and injured by thorns and sharp stones and rocks when collecting firewood in thorny bushes to burn huge marble and limestone for easy breakage as their own practice. The children suffer severe burns and get life-changing injuries from the immerse fire flames. It is bleak. The injuries and wounds get torn and reopen as the children do mining the next day. The pain from these reopened wounds and injuries is more piercing. A hopeful future is diminishing and a shadow of darkness is descending on vulnerable children’s lives. The bleakest port is that as these children forge a dismal survival in the mining pits, they don’t attend school.

In order to save these mining children’s lives endangered lives from the artisanal mining danger, and give them a chance in life. Volunteer Effort for Rural Development (VERD) is undertaking Up lift a Child project through a three-pronged strategy;
One: removing and rescuing the children from mining activities and placing them in existing schools in the community to learn; two: providing the children with some basic food support and scholastic materials to enable them remain in school and three: providing them medical care and establishing alternative livelihoods to prevent households from relying on child mining. These are the most urgent priorities to enable the vulnerable mining children in Moroto move forward. 

Education is an indispensable activity in our immediate interventions to save and improve the mining children’s lives and putting them on the same footing with their non-mining counter parts by placing them in existing primary schools such as Musupo, Tapac and Rupa to learn and cover 100 percent of their education costs.
The adverse and precarious child mining conditions in Moroto need an immediate remedy. The agony is immense. It needs joint effort to success.