Children search garbage for food as severe hunger stalks Afghanistan
By Freshta Ghani, Mehsa Elham, and Atia FarAzar
At 6 a.m., fresh sunlight rises from behind the rooftops of Firozkoh City, Ghor province as nine-year-old Naser* straps a large sack under his arm and goes to work. His job is to walk through alleys and backstreets, collecting metal, plastic, cardboard, and food from the city’s garbage.
He wears threadbare clothes and his plastic shoes are broken and worn out. Though he uses cloth to tie the soles to the upper parts of his shoes, his toes still reach the ground when he walks. “Mostly when my feet hit the gravel on the ground, they get injured and hurt a lot,” he tells Zan Times. “When I see other kids with nice shoes, I wish I had the same ones, but I don’t.”
Though he lives in the Jarganj area of the city, he treks up to 15 kilometres daily to areas like Meydan-e-Havai, Dar-e-Qazi, and Dar-e-Shikhaothers in his hunt for usable garbage. He earns a meager income by selling plastic bottles and metals. “I collect many things in a big sack, but when I sell them, I don’t earn much, usually 10 to 20 afghani. Then I’m forced to go to other areas to search for more garbage,” he explains
Sometimes he saves food salvaged from restaurant garbage bins. “Inside the trash bins, I see bread, apples, meat, and other foods that are thrown away – I collect them and take them home for my sister, father, and mother to eat,” he says. Naser also gathers paper so his mother can burn it while cooking.
Naser and his mother are their family’s main earners as his 65-year-old father is physically unable to work and his younger sister is too young to scavenge for garbage. Before the Taliban retook the country in 2021, Naser’s mother used to earn up to 6,000 afghani ($70) a month by doing laundry but that work has dropped off as the economy worsened after the Taliban takeover in 2021. Now, she earns around 1,500 afghani ($17) a month, of which 800 afghani is needed to pay rent on their home.
The dire economic conditions in Afghanistan have had an extreme impact on the country’s children. A 2022 report by Save the Children estimated that more than one million children were being forced to work to support their families as incomes plummeted in just six months after the Taliban takeover. The survey found that 82 percent of families had lost income, with one-fifth of families having “no choice but to send their children out to work.”
Since then, the hunger situation has gotten worse. In March 2023, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) announced that about 20 million Afghans are facing severe hunger, with six million of those on the brink of famine. An estimated 875,000 children are suffering from severe malnutrition while 3.2 million children and 840,000 women are experiencing moderate acute malnutrition.
The combination of economic hardship and hunger means that many Afghan children are being forced to work to help support their families.
Narges*, a 13-year-old girl, regularly searches for scrap in a garbage dump in the city of Kandahar, along with her six-year-old sister and five-year-old brother. They live with their parents in a makeshift tent inside a walled area in the old city of Kandahar. Their father has been unable to find a job since the flower shop where he worked as a caretaker closed. With little money coming in, Narges’s little sister and brother now join her as she hunts for garbage. “When my sister and brother are with me, people give us their leftover food. Sometimes restaurants give us the leftover food from their customers, and we eat it,” she tells Zan Times.
Every day, these three children traverse Kandahar looking for garbage. Narges carries a large white bag, while her sister and brother hold smaller bags. “Today we sold four kilograms of plastic and two kilograms of iron, which makes a total of 20 afghani,” she explains. “We will collect another three kilograms by evening.”
Sometimes, their little brother gets so tired that he sleeps on the ground while they continue working. “When he can’t walk anymore, we find a corner for him to sleep. When we come back after collecting paper, we wake him up,” says Narges
Garbage collection has many physical and psychological hazards for children. Out of the 15 children interviewed in Kabul, Kandahar, Jawzjan, Herat, Ghor, and Samangan by Zan Times, 14 said they’d been injured by sharp objects while handling garbage. At least six report regularly suffering from diarrhea or stomach pain. Four have skin diseases on their hands. Only three said they’d had a doctor look at their injuries. As well, nine of the 15 children report facing harassment, abuse, and beatings.
Two years ago, when Naser was just seven and new at garbage picking, he fell inside a large garbage bin in an alley while reaching in to get plastic bottles. Unable to climb out and with nobody responding to his cries for help, he spent the night inside the bin. Only in the morning, did someone hear his screams to rescue him. “The bin was very big. I couldn’t get out on my own. If that person hadn’t helped me, I would have died. I couldn’t even breathe properly. I didn’t collect any garbage that day, and I got sick the next day,” he recounts.
Injuries are a common occurrence as they handle sharp objects in the garbage. “A few days ago, when I went inside the garbage bin, glass cut my foot. Blood was everywhere, but I continued with my work. On the same day, my hand was also injured by a razor blade. I cried a lot, but someone came and bandaged my hand and foot,” he says.
Naser dreams of going to school and dressing cleanly like other children, who sometimes humiliate him for his appearance: “They call me a scavenger, garbage collector, and they hit me. Sometimes they throw stones at me. I cry and run away.” Even adults abuse garbage-picker children, he says. “Some shopkeepers and passers-by spit at me, they hit me, they hit me with a broomstick, and they say, ‘Don’t come this way, filth.’”
In December 2022, 11-year-old Zalikha* was physically attacked while collecting plastic with her younger brother in the city of Samangan. A man, after insulting them, let his dog loose on them. “He left his house gate open, and the dog chased us from behind. No matter how much we screamed, he didn’t help us and went inside his house. The dog bit my brother’s leg. We got very scared and cried,” she explains to Zan Times.
Though they were rescued by a stranger, they had no money to treat her brother’s leg. “We tied his leg with a piece of cloth and took him to the village clergy to cure him with prayer,” she says.
The increasingly strict Taliban bans on women working in public is also forcing families to send their children out to work. Zamarud*, 38, used to make 7,000 afghani a month in her job as an inspector at a private bank in Samangan province in northern Afghanistan. She lost her job due to the Taliban edicts and now she and her five children live precariously, especially as her husband is dead. Her sons no longer attend school but spend their days scouring the streets for garbage. “I wanted my sons to become doctors or engineers, but now from early morning until dinner, their heads are inside garbage and filth. When they come home, they smell. If there is soap, they wash themselves, otherwise, they just sleep like that,” she says.
“All three of my sons bring home some money, sometimes 40 afghani, other times 50 or 60 afghani until dinner,” she says, though acknowledging that they often don’t make enough to buy the necessities. “My children were crying for two nights as they wanted bread,” she says. “I made bread from wheat bran and told them to come and eat it, but they couldn’t. They cried and said they don’t want that bread, they want real bread.”
Save the Children has said in a January 2023 report that the Taliban’s ban on working women has forced children to work on the streets and in factories. The report found that 29 percent of female-led households had sent at least one child to work in 2022, compared to 19 percent in 2021. That work means the children are often unable to go to school. Of the 15 child scavengers interviewed by Zan Times, only four of them attend school.
Naeemeh Ghani, an advocate for education and children’s literature in Afghanistan, tells Zan Times that, in her work with child labourers, she’s observed how their hardships not only deprive many of the ability to get an education but also demoralizes those who do attend school. “When they came to class, they couldn’t grasp the subjects because they were tired and their minds weren’t functioning properly. They would fall asleep during lessons, and on top of that, they didn’t receive enough food throughout the day and felt weak,” she explains. Ghani worries that so many children being forced to work will jeopardize the health of the future generation.
Naser is one of those children. As he saves the money he earns from selling metal and plastic, he hungrily wanders in the market near food sources. “Some days, hotel owners give us food, or I find an apple or bread in their garbage bins, and I go to the riverside and eat it,” he says. It’s there that he indulges in his dream: “I want the day to come when I don’t have to have a sack on my back and rummage through garbage. I want to study and become a teacher, but I think this will only remain an unfulfilled dream.”
*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewees and journalists.
Mahtab Safi*, Matin Mehrab*, and Sana Atef* contributed to this article.
