WHEN she was nine years old, Ma Nwe left school and began working and caring for her younger siblings.

After her father died, she took a job at a local factory in dangerous conditions working seven days a week, with one day off each month. She was just 13 years old.

Now there’s only one hope left for this teenage factory worker — her two younger sisters. “When I left school, I was still young and I didn’t feel much,” she says. “But now, when I see others going to school, I feel so sorry.

“When they [her sisters] started school, I went to work.”

This has been a tragic cycle for decades in Myanmar, which has one of the world’s highest child labour rates. Ma Nwe’s mother went to school for just two years, starting work as a labourer breaking rocks at 13. “I still do that job now,” she says. “I’ve told my two youngest girls straight. If you are uneducated like me you will be poor ... They promised me that they would try hard.”

Ma Nwe’s little sister Khet Khet is eight years old and says she wants to be a teacher. She still attends a monastic school in Mandalay, and this is her older sister’s only hope for escaping the lifetime of poverty she was condemned to the moment she walked out of the classroom for the last time.

“If I couldn’t go to school ... I’d be a servant,” says Khet Khet.

One in four children in Myanmar (formerly Burma) drop out of school, after decades of corrupt leadership tethered to the oil and gas industries plunged the country into poverty. Now the country finally has a democratic government, things are starting to change, but it’s a slow process.

It’s usually older children who leave school to care for their younger siblings or work to support the family. “Kids would do two or three years school and then go out to work,” Childfund program development officer Richard Geeves told news.com.au. “For a lot of these kids, they’re unlikely to go to back to school, it’s too late.

“Driving around the city [Myanmar’s largest, Yangon], it’s obvious, the number of children on the street selling flowers, sweets, cleaning teashops. It is very evident.

“It’s not uncommon to see kids asleep with their heads down on the counter because the hours can be so long.

“In the country, it’s not so much petty trade as more physical labour — breaking rocks for roads, in fields or digging trenches. They have machines in cities but in the countryside a lot of work is often done by hand and it’s pretty backbreaking. The kids aren’t dressed for it, they’re often wearing [thongs] or bare feet, they might be handling pesticides.”

The average Myanmar adult has only completed 4.7 years of school. As many as 1.278 million children in the country aged 5-17 years work, half of them in areas deemed to be hazardous to their physical, psychological or moral wellbeing. Many work 10-hour days, seven days a week.

It can mean they have only a bleak future to look forward to, either continuing their repetitive, exhausting and boring labour for life, or falling victim to exploitation of a different kind.

“One thing that always accompanies economic development is the darker side of life,” says Mr Geeves. “Children from areas of the country where there has been conflict are obviously much more easily exploited.

“Historically, many migrate to Thailand and end up in the sex industry working in bars. Boys may be exploited for manual labour.

“When you’re looking at trying to reduce the number of kids who work in exploitative industries, one of the best ways is to get them into school.

“It gives them basic life skills to participate in society ... increases their chances of participating in a growing economy.

“Otherwise, they are resigned to working at the bottom of the pyramid.”

Support Childfund and its work with monastic schools in Myanmar here.