For two decades, innovative social enterprise and 2009 Skoll Awardee APOPO, has researched, developed, and implemented detection rats technology for humanitarian purposes, most notably for demining operations. It has freed over a million people from the threat of explosives—that lethal legacy of conflict. It has worked in Cambodia, Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. On the strength of its years of collaboration with the government of Mozambique, that country was declared completely free of mines in 2015. Apopo founder Bart Weetjens remains ever restless to scale the organization’s impact—leading efforts to combine rats detection with dog detection to cover more ground faster. His affection for rodents runs deeply, all the way to his childhood. “I have a secret file with 54 potential rats detection applications,” he said in a recent conversation at the Skoll offices joined by Charlie Richter, Apopo’s US director. Below are some highlights of that conversation.
Bart: When I was a boy, I bred hamsters, mice, rats, gerbils and all kinds of rodents to sell to pet shops for pocket money. I really loved rodents and I still do. I’m a Buddhist Monk and a product designer by training. I focused on real world design, appropriate technologies to solve humanitarian problems. In the early 90s when I graduated, the landmine problem became more and more prominent in the world—a structural barrier to any development.
As long as these devices or suspicion of these devices are there, people, and I’m talking mainly subsistence farmers, some of the most vulnerable communities in the world, are not able to access their lands. Through mine action over the last 20 years, there’s been a gradual reduction in casualties. Unfortunately, the last two years, it went up again up to more than 8,600 people again, mostly because of conflicts in the Middle East.
The process of clearing landmines is extremely slow, expensive, and dangerous. For every thousand landmines that are clear, statistically there’s one accident, from losing a finger, to a casualty. Rats have an extremely keen sense of smell. They are too light to set off a landmine, so they can roam freely over a suspected area. A rat can screen for landmines on the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes, and that would take up to four days for a human with a metal detector.
Bart: There was a village of 25,000 people, close to Maputo, Mozambique where there was one landmine accident around a water bore hole. A woman lost her leg. The entire population of 25,000 people decided to move away from their homes because the village wasn’t safe. They took refuge in slums around Maputo, so that had a huge developmental impact. It took more than 10 years before this area was prioritized by the National Mine Action Authority. Eventually, the demining operation found three land mines around that same bore hole—basically in an area smaller than the size of this room.
Charlie: Mozambique was declared mine free in 2015, right when I joined APOPO. It was a great thing, of course, for Mozambique and for our mission. We had basically worked ourselves out of a job. We started facilitating a project in Cambodia with the Cambodian Mine Action Center (CMAC), the biggest mine action NGO in Cambodia which has cleared about 66 percent of land in Cambodia to date. The Cambodian program has really thrived, and we’ve increased their clearance from about 300,000 square meters to one million square meters with as little of an investment as $180,000 in a rat team to speed up their operations. In Cambodia we’ve shown that over 3 million square meters of land can be cleared for under 30 cents per square meter compared to the national average of over $1. With some additional investment and deployment of more cost-effective methods, Cambodia can get to a 2025 mine-free declaration, and that’s their goal under the international landmine treaty.
Bart: The Ottawa Treaty ban against landmines now has close to 200 countries signed on, committing to clear their minefields, and not produce, stockpile, transport, or export landmines. Still though, in continuing conflicts, landmines are being used. Some in Syria on the Israeli border, and in Libya. The world community is determined to solve this problem, but there are still a few countries that continue to produce and stockpile landmines. Most mined countries have signed a UN treaty to rid their land of landmines by 2025, which sadly is unlikely under current land mine clearance productivity methods.
While global landmine detection funding is generally going up, much of it going into the Middle East, and in post conflict but at peace countries like Cambodia, Angola, and Zimbabwe, funding has sadly trended downwards, even though they have a more stable and predictable environment in which to conduct landmine detection operations and therefore make progress towards a mine free future. With proper funding and adoption of more cost-effective methods, like APOPO rats and dogs, these countries would have a realistic chance to be mine free by their 2025 mine-free UN treaty obligations.
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