HALO Trust

The HALO Trust is a non-political and non-religious registered British charity and American non-profit organization which removes debris left behind by war, in particular land mines. With about 6,000 deminers worldwide, HALO's largest operation is in Afghanistan, where the organization operates as an implementing partner of the Mine Action Programme for Afghanistan (MAPA).

HALO's global headquarters are located in Thornhill, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. HALO has US offices located in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, California.

The organization was founded in 1988 by Guy Willoughby and Colin Campbell Mitchell, a British member of Parliament and former colonel in the British Army. Guy Willoughby won the Robert Burns Humanitarian Award in 2009.

HALO is a contrived acronym for "Hazardous Area Life-support Organization".

In terms of removing landmines and Unexploded ordnance (UXO), the HALO Trust has destroyed over 1.5 million landmines, over 11 million pieces of large calibre ordnance and over 200,000 cluster munitions. Around 10,800 minefields have been cleared and 87,316 acres have been made safe from landmines, with another 361,956 acres made safe from unexploded and abandoned ordnance.

In September 2015, when Mozambique declared itself free of all known landmines, HALO announced that it had cleared 171,000 of the country’s landmines and employed 1,600 Mozambican men and women over the course of twenty-two years.

In December 2015 The HALO Trust announced that it had cleared 200,000 landmines in Sri Lanka. James Cowan, CEO said "Whilst we have much progress to celebrate in Sri Lanka today, there are still many landmines posing a serious threat to the most disadvantaged and vulnerable communities. The Sri Lankan government has set a target of 2020 for Sri Lanka to be mine-impact free, but we need long term donor commitment to reach that goal."

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