From mining to resilient futures: Pact’s Amayèle Dia empowers families to leave child labor behind

Amayèle Dia remembers vividly the first time she met a former child miner. Dia was working for Pact in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A teenage girl, the former miner had taken part in a Pact-supported vocational training program designed to help children exit mining – one of the worst forms of child labor. The girl had studied IT and computing. Thanks to her new skills, she had landed a safe, stable job as a secretary in an English language institute.

“She told me about her story,” Dia recalls, “and I felt that there was so much resilience in her words.”

A senior livelihoods officer, Dia has worked for Pact for nearly a decade. Mostly, her career has centered around helping mining families and communities to leave child labor behind – a focus area of Pact’s. It’s an especially complex social issue that Dia has steeped herself in, and though the work is challenging, she says she wouldn’t have chosen any other path. 

A native of Montreal, Canada, Dia took an unexpected path to global development and humanitarian work. She wanted to be a war reporter and studied journalism. After graduation, she took a news internship in Dakar, Senegal.

“There, I discovered that I wanted to do more than just write about people’s stories; I wanted to have a more immediate impact on their lives.”

She earned a master’s degree in Gender and Development at Leeds University in the UK. A few months later, she accepted her first job in the field, in Niger, later going on to work in Ethiopia, Haiti, and DRC. She developed a strong interest in protection issues – especially as they pertain to children, youth, and women – and sustainable development.

She came to Pact in 2016 and spent two years working on a mineral traceability initiative designed to improve the lives of small-scale miners. By 2018, her role shifted to support Pact’s work to end child labor in mining, focused mostly on DRC with eventual expansion to Zambia and Madagascar. Her current role includes strategy and project design, business development and donor liaison, as well as communications and project coordination.

“I have remained at Pact over the past decade because I feel that Pact’s mission is aligned with my values and aspirations. I have wonderful colleagues, and I really appreciate the diversity of our work and our efforts to integrate several impact areas in the various projects we design and implement.”

In describing the challenges of her role and the complexity involved in changing deeply engrained social norms around child labor, Dia shares a story. 

She was participating in a community discussion in Madagascar, as part of the Madagascar Shines project. She remembers asking a couple of adolescent miners what their aspirations for the future were and what they wanted to become. All responded that they wanted to work in the mines, even though they were seeing that their parents were not making a living out of their work as miners.

“Then another youth explained that from as far as they could remember, this was how it was for their parents, grandparents, and great grandparents,” Dia says. “They farmed during the rainy season and worked in the mines during the dry season. And this is where I realized that they were not able to imagine another option – another future.”

Dia says she is most proud of the change that she has been able to support in the lives of the thousands of children who have found a path away from mining because of Pact’s programming, which targets root causes of child mining, namely poverty, and tackles the social issue on a range of fronts, including helping communities to understand the harms of child labor and helping them to gain alternatives, such as education or safer vocations for older children. 

In a recent, key achievement, this year Dia authored Pact’s “Children Out of Mining: A Practical Guide to Pact’s Community-led Approach.” This applied guidebook is the culmination of a decade’s work developing, innovating, and implementing Pact’s Children Out of Mining approach alongside communities in and around Kolwezi, Lualaba Province, in the southern DRC Copperbelt from 2016 to 2025.

“To me, this guidebook is proof that we can end child labor in mining,” Dia says. “There is programming that really works. It may not be simple. But we have made great progress in the communities where Pact has worked.”

One lesson Dia has learned over the course of her development career is that investing in women sets a direct path toward gender equality, poverty eradication, and inclusive growth. 

“This is especially true in terms of economic empowerment. Women make enormous contributions to economies, and while important progress has been made, they still face significant obstacles to participating in the economy on equal terms with men,” Dia says. “In our Children Out of Mining program, we have found that solutions such as our WORTH community banking initiative help women to build up financial assets and access start-up capital to develop micro-enterprises. This can lift the whole family economically.”

Dia’s biggest hope is for the mining families she has met through the course of her work. 

“I hope that I have been able to improve the lives of the people and communities we work for,” she says, “and I hope that any change I have supported will be long-lasting.”