He wakes up in the morning from the dangerous shelter of a shop corridor in Lusaka and goes to the nearest dustbin where he rummages for left overs. Sometimes, he finds rotting and insect ridden food  which he has for breakfast.

Then he heads for the Central Business District, where he spends his day begging people to allow him to wash their cars, or helping shoppers load their expensive groceries into their gleaming cars.

At the end of a hard days work, he may earn nothing but on a good day he can make up to the equivalent of (US) three dollars that will enable him to have some real food. Such days are rare, however.

John Mambo is one of the thousands of children in Zambia who are being used as cheap child labour. Most are street kids, even though studies show that there is large number who have simply been 'sold' into the child labour industry by their parents or guardians because of economic hardships.

Lusaka alone has more than 3, 000 street children, according to the Ministry of Community and Social Development. Independent studies by Non Governmental Organisations (NGO's) such as Children in Need (CHIND), indicate that the number could be much higher.

But the Zambian government has now signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which will include a National Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour, which it is hoped may alleviate the problem.

Under the programme,  Zambian government will obtain an initial lump sum of 1.7 billion Kwacha, (about  $1. 4 million) which will go towards combating the scourge through various small projects.

 Edith Nawakwi, the labour and social security minister who signed on behalf of Zambia, believes the problem of child labour in Zambia is a result of the high incidence of poverty,  itself a result of chronic unemployment in the country.

The brave admission by a senior government official that unemployment could be a factor in the child labour scourge has pleased anti-child labour campaigners who feel the admission will be received positively by Zambia's co-operating partners in trying to eradicate the problem.

The poverty level, according to government statistics, is about 80 percent of the population and the average Zambian lives on one US dollar per day.

Nawakwi says, because the parents or guardians have lost employment, they have resorted to forcing their children to either beg or take on other jobs, not fit for children, in order to make ends meet.

"Child labour is a direct consequence of poverty. Households who live on less than a one US dollar per day are sending their children out as sex workers and to crush stones to earn an income," says Nawakwi.

It is her fear that, unless the government and its cooperating partners join hands to combat the problem through the provision of alternative employment for the bread-winners, the war against child labour was doomed to failure.

Laws do exist in Zambia to punish those involved in child labour but legislation alone, according to Nawakwi, has proved "inadequate to effectively resolve the problem." of child labour particularly in the informal sector.

Eighty nine percent of Zambia's labour force is either unemployed or is in the informal sectorwhere the trend of using children as a means to earn a living is more prevalent.

The other solution would be to re-direct resources and create employment for heads of household and allow children to acquire education.

The situation has unfortunately been exacerbated by the high number of orphans in Zambia whose total number, according to UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) statistics, is more than 600,000, one of the highest in Africa.

A high percentage of these orphans, most of whom are on the streets country-wide, are orphans as a result of the HIV/AIDS pandemic which has claimed the lives of one or both  parents.

"In the case of these kids," an anti-child labour campaigner said,  "empowering the parents is obviously out, you have to draw up programmes that can directly benefit them by putting them into schools or other such meaningful ventures."

One major damage child labourers suffer is that they lose out on a vital school education because they are busy doing menial jobs to sustain themselves under their families.

There is some hope that  the situation may improve in the near future with the aid coming in from International Labour Organisation and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to develop small-scale farming in Zambia, aimed at empowering the bread-winners so that they can, in turn, send their children to school and get them off the streets.

ILO representative for Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe, Louis

Ndaba-Hagamye, who signed on behalf of ILO said his organisation had commissioned a modular child labour survey which would cost almost 500,000 dollars.

Ndaba-Hagamye says a programme to prevent, remove and rehabilitate children from hazardous work in agriculture would commence in Zambia by August this year. For children, like John Mambo, the hope is that it will not be a case of too little, too late.

 For the Zambian government, its daily preoccupation is not John Mambo but the servicing of the 6.5 billion dollar foreign debt which  takes precedence before issues like child labour and the HIV/AIDS scourge that has claimed some 650, 000 lives since it became an epidemic, according to the central board of health.