Adopt-A-Minefield programme set to accelerate

The Adopt-A-Minefield programme is ready to step up its role in war-ravaged Afghanistan, one of the worst mine-affected countries in the world today. With a unique concept of fundraising, its presence in the country underscores the importance of non-traditional approaches for funding when traditional governmental sources fall short.

“We are a grassroots vehicle,” the executive director of the New York-based programme, Oren Schlein, told IRIN on Monday. With 90 percent of funding for mine-action programmes coming from governments, “we found a niche and a demand of people who want to support these efforts, but were unable to provide funding directly to the UN”, Schlein said.

The idea behind Adopt-A-Minefield - a programme of the United Nations Association of the USA, the nation’s largest grassroots foreign policy organisation - is both powerful and simple. Since the programme’s inception in March 1999, it has raised US $3.5 million for demining, and has cleared minefields in over two dozen communities in six mine-affected countries - Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, Croatia, and Mozambique.

To date more than 90 minefields, averaging about US $30,000 each, have been adopted by individuals, community groups and businesses. Some 20,000 people have participated in the programme worldwide. But it is the programme’s activities in Afghanistan that are according it the most acclaim. In the last 18 months, 22 sites have been adopted, and another five sites will be adopted by September.

“Afghanistan has, from the very beginning, been our most popular and successful programme,” Schlein stated. Most popular from a fund-raising perspective, they have raised US $750,000 for the Afghan programme alone, and are gearing themselves up for more. “At current levels, we are raising about half a million dollars a year for Afghanistan, but we should be able to double that in 18 to 24 months,” he added.

Choosing from a list of high-priority minefields provided by the Afghan national mine-action programme in the country every six months, Adopt-A-Minefield then promotes them among its donor base to raise funds. “A minefield can be as large or as small as you want it to be. We ask the centres to divide the fields into manageable chunks, so that we can sell them for around US $30,000,” he explained.

Clearance of a field typically takes about a month, and donors are particularly keen on adopting those areas that are going to promote the wellbeing of the community most, where refugees can resettle and really live a normal life. Such areas included agricultural land, grazing land or prospective areas of resettlement for refugees or internally displaced people, he added.

The adoptions represent the efforts of community groups, high-end donors and businesses. On average, the community groups spend four months raising funds in their local communities and community-based organisations, including civic groups, religious organisations and schools. Part of the fund-raising campaign includes public awareness projects to raise consciousness among donor communities about the land-mine problem.

Such confidence is welcome news to the programme manager of Afghanistan’s mine action programme, Dan Kelly, in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. The programme faces a US $5 million shortfall of its annual US $20 million budget this year.

Warning of a 20 percent cutback in capacity in August as a result, Kelly told IRIN: “Traditional donors like Canada, Norway and Denmark generally donate about US $500,000 a year to demining action, and Adopt-A-Minefield equals that.”

Calling it a “definite opportunity”, he said: “Using a traditional donor base will not allow us to maintain the capacity that we have developed for the country [to be] funded. This programme, which is non-traditional, is opening the door to another source of funding.”

Underlining what Kelly said, Schlein added: “Most people feel that since the mine-ban treaty was concluded in 1997, and after the late Princess Diana’s involvement, the issue has really died down, and there was no longer a landmine problem.”

While statistics vary, over 26,000 people are either killed or maimed by land mines in the world today, and between 150 and 300 mine-related injuries are recorded each month in Afghanistan alone.

Most people do not realise the continuing impact that this problem is having on communities, according to relief workers. Nor do they realise that mines in these communities are preventing many of the people from returning to normal productive lives.
In many areas, the presence of mines prevents people from physically moving back, from being able to reconstruct homes, to start to growing crops and cultivating land and to rebuild their lives.

“In order to help war-torn societies rebuild themselves, we have to get them on the right path,” Schlein said. “Our slogan of ‘Clear a Path to a Safer World’ is an attempt to do just that.”