For years, illegal small-scale mining — known in Ghana as galamsey — has poisoned the rivers that entire communities depend on to drink, cook, and farm. The Pra, the Ankobra, the Offin: rivers that once fed regions now run brown with mercury and cyanide.

Children are not protected from this. Some work directly at mining sites — in the pits, sorting ore. Others simply grow up beside mercury they cannot see or smell, in water their families have no alternative but to use.

Ghana has laws against this. What Ghana does not have is enforcement — because the networks profiting from galamsey are often the same networks with the power to stop it. Permits are issued. Warnings are ignored. Investigations stall. And the people paying the price are children who never signed up for any of it.

We are asking the United Nations to do what our own leaders have failed to do:

1. Launch an independent investigation into mercury and cyanide contamination in water and soil across Ghana's mining regions — Ashanti, Western, and Eastern.

2. Conduct a formal WHO health-impact assessment of mercury exposure and birth outcomes in communities nearest to active mining sites.

3. Direct UNICEF to document and intervene on the use of child labor within galamsey operations.

4. Issue a public UN statement calling on the Government of Ghana to enforce its own mining and environmental protection laws — without political exemption.

5. Support Ghanaian journalists and civil society groups investigating galamsey who face intimidation for doing so.

This is not a political petition. It is a child-protection and public-health petition. Every signature tells the UN that Ghanaians are watching, and that silence is no longer acceptable.

Sign this petition. Share it. Our children cannot wait for our leaders to find the will their interests won't let them find.