By: Benedict AbuBakarr Conteh
Children at Masongbo in one of the quarries
The afternoon sun burns hot over Masongbo, just outside Makeni. Clouds of dust rise as hammers slam into rock, the rhythm of survival echoing across the quarry. In the middle of the commotion, children barely tall enough to lift their hammers bend over heaps of granite, pelting stones into gravel with practiced hands. Their sweat mixes with dust, turning their faces grey before nightfall.
Beline Media Empire visited three quarries: Pit, Chinese, and Waterloo. At each site the story was the same: children who should be in classrooms are instead pounding stones. The ground trembles with the crack of rock, yet the silence about what this means for their education is deafening.
At Pit Quarry, a boy no older than 11 pauses to wipe dust from his face. His mother says he has not been to school in weeks.
“My child wants to go back to school,” she admits, “but we need to eat first. I find it difficult, except we come to the quarry so we can pelt stones for survival”
Nearby, a young girl carefully sorts the gravel into buckets. Her bare feet rest on sharp shards of stone. She giggles shyly when asked about school, before looking away. She has already accepted that the quarry is her classroom for now.
A group of children pelting stones for survival
At the Chinese Quarry, groups of children work side by side with adults. They laugh as they compete to see who can fill a pan of gravel first, but the innocence of their game masks the hard truth: this is not play, it is survival.
At Waterloo Quarry, older boys, their palms scarred and hardened, lift boulders onto iron plates to be smashed. One explains: “We don’t have another way. If you don’t break stones, you don’t eat.”
Interviews with adults across all three sites carried a strikingly similar sentiment: quarrying is their only livelihood.
A father at Pit Quarry leaned heavily on his hammer as he spoke:
“This work is hard, but what else do we have? We get food from here. If my child helps, it means we can survive one more day.”
Another mother at the Chinese Quarry, her hands blistered from years of stone-breaking, explained why her children joined her:
“I know school is important. But when the stomach is empty, education cannot fill it. These stones are what feed us.”
One of the mothers observing her child as he pelted stones
Their words, repeated across three quarries, paint a picture of a community trapped in poverty where survival today takes priority over investment in tomorrow.
While no school leaders were available for interviews, the evidence was clear in the empty uniforms hanging unused in homes near the quarries, and in the resigned faces of children who spoke of school as a dream, not a daily reality.
For many families, even when children want to attend, fees, books, and uniforms are unaffordable.
Despite the Free Quality Education project introduced by President Julius Maada Bio in August 2018 that made schooling free for children, quarrying has become the default support system for these communities, replacing the promise of education with the certainty of daily toil.
A boy crushing stones at a quarry
Beyond the human toll, the quarries scar the land. At the Waterloo Quarry, dust settles thickly on nearby crops, turning cassava leaves pale. In Pit, stagnant water collects in abandoned pits, breeding mosquitoes. Villagers complain that the once fertile land is now littered with stone heaps.
An elder summed it up bitterly:
“We are eating the land of our grandchildren. When the stones are gone, what will remain?”
The presence of children in the quarries is not a secret. Community members, local authorities, and even government agencies know it exists. Poverty remains the driver, pulling children into hazardous labour and pushing education out of reach.
Without stronger support systems, school feeding programs, subsidies for uniforms and books, or direct cash transfers, families will continue to choose stones over schools.
Another boy transporting stones in a headpan
Stones parked in the quarry
Makeni prides itself as an educational hub in the north, yet in its own backyard, a generation of children is learning only how to crush rock.
The question remains: how long will children’s futures be sacrificed at the altar of quarry survival?
Walking away from the Chinese quarry, the sound of hammers echoes over the land. Children’s voices blend with the clatter of stone, not in recited lessons, but in the labour of survival.
This investigation was supported by BBC Media Action and funded by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH on behalf of the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), co-funded by the European Union (EU).
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