UK Aid Match | The Difference You Made

£238,038 raised including £138,947 of match funding from the UK government

One year on from HALO's UK Aid Match campaign to raise funds to clear landmines around the village of Musanzikwa in Zimbabwe, HALO has started to make families safe.

A team of 21 HALO deminers, funded by £288,038 raised by a combination of the British public and match funding from the UK government, started work around the village last month. By combining demining by hand and using advanced new technology they cleared a one acre (or 3,968 square metres) area of a minefield and destroyed 45 landmines in their first four weeks in the village.

As part of the clearance, HALO is using a mine crushing machine called a Sizer. The Sizer was developed for HALO by the UK company Mine Machinery Developments and donated to HALO. It can process soil, rocks and landmines at a fast rate without the mines damaging the machine's crushing teeth.

The minefields around Musanzikwa were laid in the 1970s by the former Rhodesian regime during the country's Liberation War. Dense minefields were laid to prevent fighters crossing the border from Mozambique.

The minefields prevented the people of Musanzikwa farming all of their land or reaching all the local resources or trading with nearby villages.

The forced generations of children to use informal paths - such as the ones pictured below - through the minefields to get to school each day.

In total the clearance of Musanzikwa village and its near neighbour, Jangwa, will ultimately help directly make safe the 1,000 people who live very close to the minefield. Another 2,225 people who live slightly further away will also indirectly benefit from the mine clearance through improved access to resources and land. The villages are in Mashonaland Central Province, in the north east of Zimbabwe.

The minefield clearance, when complete, will return around 20 acres (82,000 square metres) of farm land to safe productive use. In a marginal community based on agriculture that land can make an enormous difference to local people's income and food security.

Bridget Tsaurai

I live behind the previously contaminated minefield and I used to cross the minefield every day to fetch water for my family. I never got used to crossing the minefield, my heart used to skip a beat when I stepped onto a stone thinking it was a landmine.

Munyaradzi Chiparavishe

I started herding my father's cattle with my older brothers when I was very young. It was the biggest nightmare when cattle strayed off safe land into the minefield. My father lost a total of six cattle to the mines which caused us a lot of financial problems. The cattle are our wealth. Now the mines are gone, we have more safe land they can graze.

Theresa Guze

My biggest fear was raising my children close to a minefield. Fortunately, the minefield closest to my home has been completely cleared. My daughter is 16 months now and I am not worried anymore when other children take her out to play.

The HALO Trust ran Breaking Boundaries, a fundraising campaign from September to December 2019 as part of the UK Aid Match programme that sees the UK Government match the funding raised by UK charities. In total HALO raised £288,038.34 including the amount of £138,947.88 matched by the UK Government.

The project being funded included a component to employ new technology to the minefields in Zimbabwe. Because the minefields are so dense they lend themselves to being cleared by the Sizer, a machine adapted from the quarrying and mining industry by MMD Ltd. of Derbyshire.

Thank you!