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.

• Author: Wines, Michael
• Position: Cover story

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...