In November 2022, Len Morris traveled to Kenya for the first time since the pandemic, to check in with supported students of the Kenyan Schoolhouse program and assess the state of children in Kenya. This is what he found.
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Fourteen-year-old Lesley Achieng, a new student at the Kenyan Schoolhouse program, recently wrote us a letter about her family circumstances and her excitement at being able to go to secondary school. While her adoptive family has been kind to take her in, she misses her siblings and her mom. “It is a fact that I am not a member of this family.”
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Recently, we had World Day Against Child Labor and unfortunately there’s little to celebrate.
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Alliance 8.7 and the world community aim to end the recruitment and use of children in war by 2025. Here’s how they’re thinking it could work.
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Children often know and practice empathy intuitively… they know when something is amiss or just wrong.
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Houses of Joy in Costa Rica provide food security, child care and medical services for semi-nomadic indigenous Ngäbe-Buglé “trans-border migrant” families - a transformational alliance between governments, civil society and coffee farmers.
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24-year-old lawyer Amar Lal has seen and felt the pain of child labor. Strictly speaking, child labor runs in the family. In 2021, the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour, Amar tells the ILO and world leaders that more needs to be done to end child labor entirely.
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Garment production in India shut down abruptly as a result of Covid 19. Multinational companies who skipped out on their obligations to pay for work already ordered made matters much worse. The Indian government appealed for employers to “be kind” to their desperate employees. Unfortunately, kindness is discretionary.
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Kailash Satyarthi joins numerous Nobel Peace Prize Laureates and world leaders calling for 20% of coronavirus pandemic aid to be earmarked for poor children.
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When the coronavirus hit Kenya, all schools closed abruptly. Kenyan Schoolhouse kids, from the poorest and most vulnerable of families, were sent home. To help provide emergency food aid, see gofundme.com/f/kenyan-schoolhouse-at-home. Len tells the story of Sylvie and the beginnings of Kenyan Schoolhouse.
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Twenty-two years since the Harkin-Engel Protocol, the absolute number of child laborers in cocoa has actually increased. Find out why. Maybe doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the problem?
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"Child Abuse - down, down!" Indian schoolchildren chant to protect their peers from sexual exploitation on the Bharat Yatra marching throughout India.
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Four years after his death, Robin shows up in India.
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If we can imagine a world where a tiny tax on financial transactions generates hundreds of billions of dollars every year to be used to alleviate poverty, it would be fair to ask, "Who gets this money", "How do we deliver money and services to the poor?" and, "How can we be sure the aid won't be stolen or wasted?"
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For the past twenty years, I have filmed children all over the world in every conceivable form of poverty and abuse, from global child labor (Stolen Childhoods, 2004) to the struggles of street children (Rescuing Emmanuel, 2009). The Same Heart is the third film in this trilogy, and it confronts one of the central issues of our time: growing inequality and poverty with its impacts on children in the U.S. and abroad.
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The playground appeared perfectly normal with students clustered here and there laughing and enjoying their lunch break. But if you looked closely, you’d notice another group milling about or sitting alone, the students with empty lunch pails.
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Len Morris is interviewed for Worldview on WBEZ 91.5 Chicago Public Radio about The Same Heart.
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Filming in Kenya in late 2012 we interacted with hundreds of children; at their schools, in their homes and as we crisscrossed the country in our production van. The filming had gone on for weeks and it was depressing to see these bedraggled babies, with their rags and obvious malnutrition. We wished a major charity was in the van, handing out food aid and clean water but we settled on lollipops, thousands and thousands of lollipops.
We'd see a group of children by the side of the road and stop and prepare for a lollipop moment, a way of giving love with no strings attached.
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More of Robin Romano's photographs of children around the world.
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