American actress Michelle Rodriguez filmed a documentary segment highlighting young children working for a brick manufacturer in Peru.
Rodriguez appears at a brick manufacturing site in an undisclosed location where she interviews “Dina,” the mother of three children who work with her. Dina’s six-year-old daughter Yulia attends school for a few hours before coming to work on the site, where she turns bricks over in the hot sun. The family earns $4 per day.
“When I came here and I saw Yulia and her little brother working here, I was disgusted. I personally don’t ever want to come back here again,” Rodriguez said in the segment. “To know that a couple of bucks can change that cycle, I think it’s worth a shot.”
Rodriguez filmed the spot for the Red Nose Day charity which aims to combat poverty using “the power of entertainment to create positive change.” The fundraiser which aired on NBC last Thursday also featured Jack Black with street children in Kampala, Uganda.
Over 1 million Peruvian children aged 6 to 14, or 19.4% of all children, are engaged in child labor. Only 79.4% attend school, of which 91% complete primary school.
In 2012 the United States launched a $13 million pilot program aimed at reducing Peru’s child labor rate by boosting access to education and supplementing family incomes in Peru’s poorest regions.
According to the World Bank, one in five Peruvians live in poverty as defined by earning less than $2 per day, and one in 25 live in extreme poverty earning less than $1.25 per day.
See Michelle Rodriguez’s segment below.
Sources
Red Nose Day – Michelle Rodriguez’s Tearful Discovery (YouTube)
2013 Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor (U.S. Department of Labor)