Aid Can Be Sustainable

In a country like Afghani stan, where many young adults find it tough to get work and disabled young adults find it tougher still, the best hope for landmine accident survivors is to be trained in a skill that generates income.

Better yet is for them to use their new skill to help make Afghanistan's countryside safer for others who face the danger of unexploded ordnance.

Haroon Hamdard, a 30-year-old native of Nangarhar Province, was himself a deminer with a clearance mission. But while in Herat Province, a small, inadvertent error cost him his right hand and a means of steady employment for the next several years.

"With my right leg, I accidentally kicked a stone," he recalls. "It set off the mine."

After he received emergency medical care and, later, a prosthetic arm, Haroon remained unemployed for six difficult years. He was forced to borrow money from relatives and others to survive. But he took the opportunity to finish his high school education and in early 2008 received a unique opportunity to go back to work.

Clear Path International, a U.S.-based humanitarian mine action nonprofit organization, had just formed the Afghan Mine Action Technology Center in Kabul to create employment for disabled deminers and fabricate products for the demining industry. Afghan demining organizations were asked to suggest possible employees. Haroon became AMATC's first technician.

Today, Haroon oversees procurement of materials needed to produce the dozenplus products that are sold to commercial and non-profit demining outfits throughout Afghanistan. His income from AMATC allows him to travel home each weekend and to support his wife, two children and five nephews.

AMATC has "a very holistic mission," says Roberta Burns, the Kabul-based representative for the U.S. Department of State Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement (WRA), which funds CPI's work with victims of war-time explosives, their families and their communities in Afghanistan and other mine-impacted parts of the world.

Conceived by CPI and its subcontractor, Elegant Design and Solutions, AMATC also generates revenue from product sales to sustain its operation and to support local physical rehabilitation and treatment facilities such as the Kabul Orthopedic Organization, one of CPI's nine implementing partners in Afghanistan.

"It's excellent social entrepreneurship," says Burns. "It's exactly what we're looking to do in Afghanistan."

Along with AMATC's humanitarian mission, the center's emphasis on providing top-quality equipment designed to increase safety and comfort over long periods of use for deminers has prompted WRA to recommend its products to other U.S. funded mine-clearance contractors in Afghanistan.

The center currently offers demining hand tools and accessories, counter-IED equipment and replacement parts for the Bozena 4 demining machine, as well as training and first-aid kits. Many of the tools are lighter in weight and because the products are locally made, they often cost less than those supplied by foreign sources.

Frequently, design concepts originate from customer input as to what would make a more effective tool in the field, says AMATC Technical Advisor Gehn Fujii.

All tools are field-tested by actual deminers on real mines and are certified by the Mine Action Coordination Center of Afghanistan (MACCA), says AMATC Project Manager Ehsan. As an example, he notes that the center's modular prodder put through an anti-personnel mine blast stayed intact. "It did not fragment," Ehsan says.

Last summer, AMATC won its first large contract (grossing $244,000) from the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan. And while the center will continue to pursue these types of orders, it also will work on building product stock to sell off the shelf.

While these huge contract based orders are important, they are "not ideal from a sustainability standpoint," Fujii says. "There's no month-to-month cash flow."

Eleven employees now depend on AMATC for a monthly wage. Besides Haroon Hamdard, there are five technicians, two machinists, one team leader and a driver and custodian. CPI and AMATC hope to increase employment as production and sales grow.

In keeping with the center's mission as an employment program for persons with disabilities, 75 percent of AMATC workers must be disabled. At the same time, it seems no injury is great enough to disqualify an otherwise able job candidate - certainly not lost limbs, nor even eye sight. Manufacturing tools, procedures and workstations have been modified for easier and more efficient use by disabled staff.

For Haroon, who has become an unofficial AMATC poster child, the center has been a lifesaver, a means of regaining the dignity he lost after his injury. He is fond of reciting the CPI motto that "disability is not inability." But he means it.

"Before I had very great depression," he says. "Now, I don't have."