APOPO is a social enterprise that trains HeroRATs to detect landmines and Tuberculosis. Our work helps communities to pick up their life after a conflict, and keeps tuberculosis from harming individuals and their families. While the HeroRATs do the hard work, it's your donations that help us save lives!

How can you help ?

just $10 will clear 107 square feet of minefield in Mozambique or Cambodia.

will clear 107 square feet of minefield in Mozambique or Cambodia. $25 will feed one mine detection HeroRAT for 7 months (that's including the odd banana treat after a hard week's work)

will feed one mine detection HeroRAT for 7 months (that's including the odd banana treat after a hard week's work) $50 will prevent one Tanzanian from a TB infection

Feel free to set ypur own challenge! How about clearing an area the size of your garden, the school playground or company parking lot ? Or sponsoring TB detection for each member of your family or sports club ? Don't forget -- $8,000 will support the entire 9-month training process of one HeroRAT !

The land mine problem

When a war is over, land mines and unexploded ordnance often stay in place. They cause injuries or death in children playing, farmers growing food, cattle grazing. Large areas of fertile land are left alone, because people are afraid. Our HeroRATs help us find and remove land mines, giving back the land to the communities.

Thousands of innocent children and adults are injured or killed by landmines every year. Villages are cut off from basic needs such as water sources and travel routes, and cannot grow crops or graze livestock on unsafe land. Detection of these devices is difficult, dangerous, costly and time-consuming. Well, usually. APOPO's innovative approach is faster and cheaper.

APOPO's landmine detection rats can quickly and accurately detect landmines, significantly speeding up mine clearance efforts and allowing communities to use their land again. APOPO's HeroRATs can search around 200 square meters in 20 minutes. This would take 25 operational hours using metal detectors. To date, APOPO has cleared over 11 million m2 of contaminated land and found over 50,000 explosive remnants of war in 6 countries, helping over 900,000 people to get back on their productive land.

The tuberculosis challenge

Every year, 9 million people are infected with tuberculosis (TB), yet about 3 million of those don’t receive the care they need. Why ? They don't get diagnosed correctly and quickly enough. An untreated TB patient can infect a dozen other people per year, so it's good news that APOPO's HeroRATS can identify positive TB samples!

Tuberculosis (TB) is a disease of poverty. In 2013, an estimated 9.0 million people developed TB and 1.5 million died from the disease, 360 000 of whom were HIV-positive. In Tanzania, only 50% of TB patients are diagnosed. In addition, the microscopy diagnostic process misses a lot of positive samples, so TB patients are sent home with false assurances -- leading to even more infections.

HeroRATs quickly and accurately sniff out TB in human sputum samples, increasing new case findings. One HeroRAT evaluates more samples in ten minutes than a lab technician in one day. Fast, effective TB diagnosis means patients can access treatment sooner, reducing the spread of the deadly virus and limiting the impact on the patient's family and the wider community. Our programs in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Maputo (Mozambique) have resulted in an increase of over 40% extra case detections on samples that the clinics originally diagnosed as TB negative.

More information ?

APOPO has its headquarters in Tanzania and also has programs in Mozambique, Thailand, Angola, and Cambodia. Discover more about these programs, their successes and how we do what we do on our website.