2023 Winner
Mines Advisory Group
Team of disaster and conflict response experts, MAG is the world’s leading awareness and clearance organisation.
Mines Advisory Group has been leading the way in one of the world’s most challenging fields for more than 30 years – working to clear deadly landmines from current and former conflict zones. The organisation, founded in 1989, was the brainchild of Rae McGrath, a one-time British Army engineer who witnessed first-hand the destruction caused by the weapons during his time in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Rae said: “We found that everything we tried to do was blocked because of the presence of landmines. We trained a local team to work with them with the idea that we were just going to get rid of the landmines that were in the way of agricultural rehabilitation. Of course, what we didn’t realise at that stage was that the whole of Afghanistan was covered by landmines.”
The very first MAG project was a wide-scale survey of landmines in Afghanistan. On returning to the UK, Rae, along with his wife Debbie and brother Lou, set up the Mines Advisory Group as an international charity. “Very quickly we began to realise that there were landmines in almost every country where there’d been war, and that nobody was clearing them up when the war finished and more were being made and used all the time.” said Rae.
MAG soon made an impact. Within 5 years of its launch, it was part of a successful international coalition to ban landmines which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for its work. Princess Diana also backed the cause, speaking at an event organised by MAG in the same year. “That was tremendously important because it was, in a way, a capstone on the demand for a ban on landmines,” said Rae.
Today, more than 30 years since it began, Manchester-based MAG continues to operate around the world, currently working in conflict zones including Syria, Iraq and Ukraine. To date, the charity has worked to clear mines from more than 70 countries, keeping 20 million people safe. Head of Philanthropy, Sarah Tavener from MAG said: “The more funds that we raise, the more missions we can conduct. And whether they be in the Ukraine, where obviously a conflict is very active right now or in Vietnam, where the conflict has been over for many years, every single one of those landmines taken out of the ground makes a huge difference to people’s lives.”
MAG CEO Darren Cormack added: “I feel sad that we have to be here, but determined to be here as long as we’re needed.”