Nine-year-old alone Banda works six days a week: he's one of 49 million children in sub-Saharan Africa who are forced to work for a living. While child-labor rates are falling in most of the world, they're still on the rise in Africa.

In an abandoned quarry south of Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, children spend their days beating pieces of rock, slowly reducing them to gravel and powder. The output is I on display beside many of Zambia's highways--waist-high piles of gravel, and bags packed with crushed stone or powder. The bags are sold to construction crews as a mixer for concrete, often to line swimming pools of Lusaka's wealthier residents.

A 9-year-old boy named Alone Banda does this miserable work at the quarry six days a week.

He takes football-size chunks of fractured rock and beats them into powder. In a good week he can make enough powder to fill half a bag. His grandmother sells each bag for 10,000 kwacha, less than $3. Often, she says, Alone's work is the difference between eating and going hungry.

By the United Nations' latest estimate, more than 49 million sub-Saharan children age 14 and younger worked in 2004, which is 1.3 million more than in 2000. Their tasks are not merely the housework and garden-tending common in most developing (and developed) societies. They are prostitutes, miners, construction workers, pesticide sprayers, haulers, street vendors, full-time servants, and they are not necessarily even paid for their labor. In Kenya, nearly a third of the coffee pickers were children, a 2001 World Bank Report found. In Tanzania, 25,000 children worked in hazardous jobs on plantations and in mines.

Across the globe, the number of children forced to work is in sharp decline. In Asia, the number has dropped by 5 million in just four years. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the decline was even more drastic, nearly 12 million. Sub-Saharan Africa is the exception.

WHY AFRICA IS DIFFERENT

Why is the number of child workers growing in Africa, while it is declining everywhere else? Child labor declines with prosperity, and so Africa's economic plight--44 percent of sub-Saharan residents live on less than $1 a day--is a big reason.

But there are others: Hard work by children is the social norm, and conflicts scatter families and kill breadwinners. There is also the problem of AIDS, which has created millions of orphans who must work to survive, and has forced millions more to work to support dying parents.

Alone and his grandmother rise at about 6:30 a.m. and make the haft-hour walk to the quarry. Alone describes his day in the most basic English: "I break the rocks. I get up early in the morning, before the sun rises. For breakfast, I drink tea sometimes. This morning, I didn't eat. I'm hungry."

After two hours, he walks to Tatwasha Basic School, a state-run institution near his home, where he is in second grade. Tatwasha has 3,000 students. About 300 work in the quarries. "Most of these children are orphans," says Maureen Chinjenge, the school's headmistress.

After school, Alone returns to the quarry where he attacks his pile of rocks for five more hours, until sunset. A scab marks his left cheek, damage from a sliver of rock that flew into his face after an especially hard strike.

Other stone-crushers complain of broken fingers, impaired vision, or a "heavy chest," an early sign of lung disease, but Alone says he has suffered no serious injuries beyond some smashed fingers and cut eyes. "It's a hard job," he says. "I hurt myself sometimes."

If the stereotype of child labor is an Oliver Twist world of sweatshops with youngsters bent over sewing machines or metal presses, Africa's reality is different.

In Lusaka, a city of 1.2 million, the number of child laborers is growing. "We see a lot of child-headed households as a result of H.I.V.," says Yvonne Chilufya, a project manager for Jesus Cares Ministries, a Zambian organization that assists street children and other child laborers.

"In other cases, you find the parents are both alive, but doing nothing, chronically ill. So the children are taking care of the parents. The parents send the children out to find food."

The last time Zambia's government counted, in 1999, it found nearly 600,000 child laborers between the ages of 5 and 17. Almost all were

unpaid. On paper, at least, most were illegal: Zambian law forbids labor by children under 13, and allows those between 13 and 15 to engage only in light work. Chola J. Chabala, the Zambian official charged with reducing child labor, says the number of children who work is growing despite his government's efforts.

"I do this job with a passion, but it is very depressing at the end of the day," he says. "I've heard children who work as prostitutes say they would rather die from AIDS because it is slower than dying of hunger."

NO ELECTRICITY, NO TOILET

Crushing stone is considered one of the worst forms of child labor, full of risks from flying rock fragments, misdirected hammers, and years of inhaling dust. Like prostitution, it is a job undertaken for survival, not profit.

The quarries have their own economy: Men split boulders into smaller chunks, then sell them to women whose families reduce them to gravel and powder. Homeless and unsupervised children hire themselves out for about 30 cents a day to help with the crushing.

Alone lives with his grandmother, Mary Mulelema, in a single room, perhaps 8 by 12 feet. There is no electricity. Pencils of sunshine streaming through holes in the corrugated asbestos roof supply the only light. There is no toilet; the stench of human waste wafts upward from bushes outside. Water is hauled in from a community tap. Mulelema sleeps on the couch; Alone sleeps on the concrete floor.

He has been living with his grandmother since his mother died in 2001. His father is a mystery.

The two or three bags of rock powder that Alone can produce in a month bring in almost enough to pay the $11 a month for rent and access to the community water tap.

Sales of the gravel she produces earn barely enough money to buy corn meal and small, dried fish that the two eat for dinner. "We don't eat breakfast every day," she says. "At lunch we have sweet potatoes, and then we wait for supper. If I decide to have my breakfast, it means I won't have anything for supper."

For Mulelema, Alone's work in the quarries and the money it provides is literally the difference between eating and going hungry, and a hair's-breadth difference at that.

Michael Wines covers Africa for The New York Times.

In the 21st century, child labor is largely found in Third World countries. And the reason for its existence is the same today as it always has been: Poverty forces children to work. This is especially true in sub-Saharan Africa. It's the only region in the world where child tabor is still on the rise.

CRITICAL THINKING

* Ask students to imagine what the rest of Alone Banda's life might be like. What kind of education will he get? Will he have a family, a job, a home life? How long might he live? What could be done to make his life better?

DEBATE

* The article says that the practice of child Labor violates Zambian Law. (The country has also signed two international conventions restricting the use of child labor.)

* Ask students to take sides on the question of whether the international community should exert economic or other pressures on Zambia to honor its own laws and international agreements on child labor.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

* What would students do if they were in journalist Michael-Wines's shoes? Help out or just do their jobs and move on?

* What might Zambia's government do to halt the growth in child labor? What hurdles might the government face?

FAST FACTS

[right arrow Of the world's 193 countries, 147 have ratified the International Labor Organization's Convention setting a minimum age (14-16) for child Labon

[right arrow] It was not until 1938 that the Fair Labor Standards Act placed restrictions on the use of child Labor in the U.S.

WEB WATCH

http://hrw.org/children/Labor.htm Human Rights Watch, a group that investigates human rights abuses worldwide, provides background on child labor, including numerous links to examples of child labor in many countries.

1. There is a strong relationship between the incidence of child labor and a country's

a education system.

b economic health.

c climate.

d form of government.

2. Between 2000 and 2004, the number of working children around the world

a increased.

b remained about the same.

c declined, then increased.

d declined.

3. The headmistress at Tatwasha Basic School, which Atone Banda attends, says most of the children who work in quarries

a are orphans.

b do well in school.

c have AIDS.

d rely on aid from the U.S.

4. Which statement accurately describes the legal status of most of Zambia's working children?

a Those who work as street vendors are legal; most other child workers are illegal.

b Since work is a necessity for many children, it has been made legal.

c Most child labor is illegal because the law forbids work for those under 13 and allows only light work for those between 13 and 15. d Work is legal for boys, but not for girls.

5. Michael Wines's code is simple: He

a gives only to the very poorest.

b won't give to people who live in dictatorships.

c never gives more than $75.

d never gives money before an interview.

6. Briefly explain the connection between AIDS and child labor.--

IN-DEPTH QUESTIONS

1. Should the U.S. government punish American companies that sell products made by children overseas?

2. Do you believe that U.S. journalists who work in poor countries should provide assistance to the people they write about? Or does helping out mean they can no longer report a story from a neutral point of view?

1. [b] economic health.

2. [d] declined.

3. [a] are orphans.

4. [c] Most child work is illegal because the law forbids work for those under 13 and allows only light work for those between 13 and 15.

5. [d] never gives money before an interview.

6. AIDS has killed or sickened so many adults that orphans and even those children whose parents are still alive are forced to work to support themselves and their families. (Similar wording is acceptable.)