Landmines and Livelihoods in Afghanistan: Evaluating the Benefits of Mine Action

Abstract

Mine action started in Afghanistan and, globally, has grown into a billion-dollar endeavour. On most measures, Afghanistan remains the world's largest mine action programme, which has performed admirably in terms of delivering outputs such as square metres cleared and devices destroyed. But less is known about when and how mine action enhances the well-being of people in mine-affected communities. This article outlines how the Sustainable Livelihoods approach has been used to provide a better understanding of the benefits of mine action, and how capacities have been developed to conduct future evaluations without dependence on international specialists, reducing both costs and risks.

Keywords:

• mine action
• landmines
• Afghanistan
• Sustainable Livelihoods
• evaluation
• evaluation capacity development

Notes

¹ Humanitarian demining implies survey and clearance activities that are not for military or purely commercial purposes. It is not limited to demining in support of humanitarian aims.

² See Pound et al. 2011, 2012.

³ MACCA is a project of the UN Mine Action Service (UNMAS) and serves as the de facto national mine action centre on behalf of the government.

⁴ Mine action is also financed by governments in mine-affected countries (US$195 million recorded by Landmine Monitor for 2011), by the UN assessed budget for peacekeeping operations (almost US$90 million), and via commercial contracts for public and private investments, which amounted to an estimated US$85 million in 2009–2010 for Afghanistan alone. Globally, non-military mine action is at least a US$1 billion per year industry.

⁵ For the case of Sudan, see Bennett et al. 2010.

⁶ The official titles are Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction (Ottawa Treaty) and the Convention on Cluster Munitions (Oslo Treaty). Although some states have not ratified these conventions, they have been successful in establishing international norms against the use of such weapons, and many non-signatories abide by those norms.

⁷ ‘From a humanitarian perspective, Afghanistan cannot focus only on AP removal at the expense of AT and [battle field] removal. There are AT minefields and [battlefields] with a higher priority for clearance than some AP minefields’ (GIRA 2012, 9). UXO — not landmines — accounts for about two-thirds of civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

⁸ Another way of looking at the value-for-money of L&L evaluations is a ‘reasonableness comparison’: the cost of evaluation versus the cost of mine action. Using clearance data from MACCA, about US$30 million had been spent on demining in the 25 communities covered by the 2010 survey. The pilot L&L evaluation cost only 0.66% of the demining expenditures and significantly added to the understanding of the outcomes achieved.