(Bill Angelucci / NBC News)
TARANTA-BAS, Madagascar — A boy climbs out of a pit in the ground and shields his eyes from the sun. His hands and feet are covered in dust, his T-shirt and shorts covered in rips.
The boy has spent the last several hours working inside the pit. Now above ground, he proudly holds up an example of his labor: a silvery sheet of mica, the iridescent mineral shimmering in the afternoon light.
The boy is 10 years old, but he doesn’t go to school. He works for much of the day — and sometimes through the night — crawling through pitch-black tunnels inside the makeshift mine, his fingers picking through the earth, collecting and sorting shards of mica.
The minerals he picks up will soon make their way through an opaque supply chain from Africa to Asia before landing in millions of products — electronics, appliances, even trains — that wind up in America.
“My mother doesn’t make enough money,” says the boy, whose name is Manjoraza. “So I have to help her make money.”
WATCH: Cynthia McFadden takes "TODAY" to the mica mines of Madagascar
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Who’s helping? Terre des Hommes is creating safe child care at the mine sites. UNICEF is providing ways for kids to learn in Madagascar, including at mica processing centers.
Manjoraza is among thousands of children working in Madagascar’s mica industry — an underground army of little laborers who go largely unseen in a country famous for its lush forests, vanilla crop and lemur population.
Here, where Madagascar’s mica supply chain begins, the boy and his family are trapped in a cycle of extreme poverty, exploitation and child labor that spans generations. Without clean water, access to health care or schooling, children like Manjoraza see their present and their future as revolving around the shards of mica buried in the pits down below.
The magic mineral: Mica is everywhere
Mica is the name applied to a group of minerals that form in layers at once flexible and strong.
A longtime staple of the cosmetics industry, mica is known for adding sparkle to makeup products and paints. But it’s also prized in the electronics and automotive worlds due to its ability to transmit electric force without overheating, even under extreme temperatures.
In Madagascar, an island nation of 25.5 million people located off the southeast coast of Africa, it’s mined by hand in a cluster of sites in the country’s rugged south. In 2016, Madagascar overtook India as the biggest global exporter of sheet mica, the grade used extensively in the electronics and automotive industries, according to the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database.
Mica mining in India has generated controversy in recent years for its use of child labor and unsafe conditions. But Madagascar’s mica sector has garnered little scrutiny even as it has developed into a critical source for international manufacturers.
NBC News traveled more than 400 miles through Madagascar’s remote south with the Dutch child protection group Terre des Hommes and witnessed scores of children working in unregulated and poorly-ventilated mica pits, as well as processing centers, alongside other family members.
A review of hundreds of shipping records revealed how the vast majority of mica mined in Madagascar flows to China and ends up in component parts in American products, such as hair dryers, audio speakers and batteries.
And interviews with executives in Madagascar’s mica industry showed that the prevalence of child labor is well known but largely dismissed as a byproduct of extreme poverty.
Taken together, a picture emerges of children as young as 4 years old performing long hours of labor-intensive work in often dangerous conditions to collect a mineral whose price will be inflated nearly 500 times by the time it leaves Madagascar’s shores.
“Working in mines is considered one of the worst forms of child labor,” Claire van Bekkum, senior project manager at Terre des Hommes, said. “They’re in a hazardous situation health-wise and safety-wise.”
By Lisa Cavazuti, Christine Romo, Cynthia McFadden and Rich Schapiro
Nov. 18, 2019
Zone Rouge’:
An army of children toil in African mines
How mica mined by kids in Madagascar ends up in
products used by millions of Americans.
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