Landmines, Tuberculosis… and Trained Rats?

Although they appear to have little in common, landmines and tuberculosis in fact share several similarities. Despite having straightforward solutions, both persistently hurt some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable communities: as many as 110 million landmines remain buried across more than 60 countries,¹ while tuberculosis, though easily treatable, kills more than 1 million people a year.² Also uniting both is a core challenge—detection—and an unconventional solution: African giant pouched rats, which have a powerful sense of smell, can be trained to sniff both out.

Belgium-based nonprofit APOPO (a Flemish acronym for Anti-Personnel Landmines Detection Product Development) developed this novel solution and scaled it to 12 countries. Too light to trigger a blast, the rats skitter across minefields and scratch the ground wherever they smell a trace of explosive—enabling mined fields to be cleared more safely, more quickly, and at a lower cost than other methods. Trained rats can also detect the presence of tuberculosis in a human sample more quickly and accurately than a lab technician can using a microscope.

APOPO works closely with national, regional, and local governments in its operations, and deploys its rats and methodology through existing demining and tuberculosis detection programmes. Its work has been supported by multilateral agencies, NGOs, philanthropies, and the private sector, while APOPO itself involves community members and poor and vulnerable populations in its projects. To date, APOPO has cleared more than 160,000 landmines and detected more than 27,000 cases of tuberculosis.³

APOPO exemplifies an impact hub—a mode of public problem-solving that can be applied to everything from complex global crises to local issues. Impact hubs bring together partners from across sectors to address a specific, clearly defined challenge. They implement focused solutions, track the impact of that work, and complement—rather than replace—existing efforts and institutions.

Impact hubs bring together partners from across sectors to address a specific, clearly defined challenge. They complement—rather than replace—existing efforts and institutions.

The Chandler Institute of Governance, and think tank and civic enterprise New America, are working together to develop and share tools that help policymakers and civic entrepreneurs better understand—and implement—impact hubs.

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An Impact Hub Has Five Key Features

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Collaborative, Focused Initiatives Producing Real Impact

From public health to public safety, farming to climate adaptation, housing to environmental protection, impact hubs can address a wide range of problems in a wide range of areas. An impact hub can limit its work to a locality or region, or it can operate at a national or global scale. They can be started by anyone searching for an innovative approach to solving a public problem: an official in a national government; a local community leader; a philanthropist; a CEO; a professor; a faith leader; the head of a UN agency; your neighbour.

Whatever its focus, an impact hub addresses a specific, concrete problem, uses clear metrics for success, and works with partners from across sectors. Impact hubs might exist for a few months or a few years (or even decades), but since they are intended to solve a specific problem and then close or transition into something else, impact hubs are time-bound institutions. An impact hub does not spread itself too thin; it avoids the temptation to broaden its focus and become a permanent fixture in the political system.

An impact hub does not spread itself too thin; it avoids the temptation to broaden its focus and become a permanent fixture.

A New Approach to Tackle New Kinds of Problems

Today’s proliferating crises demand cooperation, collective action, and new ways of organising and acting in global politics. And yet all too frequently, institutions respond to these complex challenges by returning to a familiar playbook: they form committees or agencies. More often than not, this leads to increased administrative workload and institutional bloat, rather than focused results.

Impact hubs emphasise achieving specific policy goals over broad agendas; they are meant to not only discuss issues but actively contribute solutions.

Impact hubs represent a shift in both mindset and practice for how governments, communities, businesses, and citizens can collaborate to solve problems that transcend traditional borders and silos. They emphasise achieving specific policy goals over broad agendas; they are meant to not only discuss issues but actively contribute solutions. Importantly, an impact hub is not simply about establishing something new. Even within thriving institutions, increasing engagement and co-creating solutions can produce better, more inclusive outcomes. Impact hubs are a means to do this in a focused and targeted way.

A Blueprint for Success

In January 2024, the Chandler Institute of Governance and New America jointly published an Impact Hub Field Guide on how to build and shape an impact hub—giving readers a sense of where to begin, and how to get started.⁴ Drawing on real-world case studies, consultations with practitioners and scholars, and an interdisciplinary body of research, the Field Guide offers concrete steps and insights for how to collaborate across silos to solve public problems.

The Field Guide’s recommendations are meant to be tailored to the nature, scale, and context of the problem that an impact hub is solving—it is a map to help people navigate new territory, rather than a list of instructions to be rigidly followed.

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Field Stories to Inspire and Educate

Following the publication of the Field Guide, CIG and New America released several comprehensive case studies of impact hubs in action, to share real-life examples of how they work in practice from inception to implementation.

One case study spotlighted the work of APOPO, the non-profit organisation using trained rats to detect landmines and tuberculosis.⁵ Another detailed Singapore’s Alliances for Action (AfA), featuring six separate initiatives to address issues ranging from supporting lower-wage workers to combating online harm, nurturing stewardship of public parks, and co-creating climate action plans.⁶

Impact Hubs in Action: Singapore’s Alliances for Action

The six AfAs profiled in the Singapore case study closely align with the impact hub concept: they are action-oriented, and address complex issues that demand cross-sector collaboration. They were also not designed to continue indefinitely: most AfAs set clear timelines on when they were to be concluded.

From their inception, the AfAs were inclusive. The approach emerged from a taskforce convened by the government during the pandemic that comprised more than 20 representatives from government, private sector, trade unions, and academia, and which reached some 2,000 individuals from more than 900 organisations.⁷ The AfAs then became vehicles for people to take action on problems they themselves had helped identify.

Uplifting Lower-Wage Workers

One of the six AfAs saw the Ministry of Manpower, the National Trades Union Congress, the Singapore National Employers Federation (SNEF), and 50 members of the public come together to help improve conditions for lower-wage workers.

This group began by taking a potentially broad challenge and focusing on four specific areas of action, including strengthening public respect and appreciation for these workers, and fostering more supportive working environments. They produced clear problem statements, sourced ideas to tackle these problems, shortlisted ideas, researched and refined their ideas, and then implemented pilot projects.

The first run of eight projects included campaigns to raise awareness of lower-wage workers among Singaporeans, initiatives to encourage employers to show more empathy to their lower-wage workers, and programmes to develop rest areas for these workers. The success of the AfA approach led to a second run of nine projects over a span of 17 months. Some of those projects were continued from the first run, while others were new, including one that matched individuals from lower-income families to suitable jobs, and another that made it easier for lower-wage workers to access training and development opportunities.

Spreading Sunlight

Another AfA tackled the issue of online harms, especially those targeted at women and girls.

Again, the process was inclusive from its inception. The Ministry of Communications and Information worked with 48 members of the public between 2021 and 2022, and in the months before the AfA launched, there were engagement sessions with more than 300 stakeholders across the public and private sector. AfA members were organised into five workstreams based on their respective passions and areas of expertise, and they helped produce a number of concrete outcomes: raising awareness through webinars, working with helplines and pro bono legal clinics, and establishing a new charity, SG Her Empowerment (SHE).

Government as Supporter and Enabler

Although the details of the AfAs differ, each offers a glimpse of how a government can orchestrate and encourage collaborative initiatives. The Singapore Government Partnerships Office, housed under the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth, served as a coordinating node: it supports public sector agencies in adopting effective public-private-people collaboration models such as the AfA. The government did not set targets on how many AfAs each ministry or agency should have, nor did it micromanage the AfAs themselves.

Instead, the government helped identify situations where AfAs were more likely to succeed—such as having people involved who were both willing and able to act, and where partners shared clear alignment on outcomes—and played a supporting role.

Encouraging Impact and Action

If you do not change direction, as the saying goes, then you might end up where you are heading. Whether it is climate change or biodiversity loss, economic inequality or global health, altering the course of today’s crises will require new ways of cooperating, organising, and acting—exactly what an impact hub looks to inspire.

People all over the world motivated to tackle all sorts of problems can adopt and adapt the impact hub model to fit their needs. It is available to anyone skilled and driven enough to pull together partners to pursue a mission with measurable impact—and it is nimble enough to respond to a changing environment to accomplish its mission.

A number of impact hubs already exist, whether or not they use the term to characterise themselves. Identifying their common elements, developing a common vocabulary to capture their attributes, and sharing their stories can, we hope, offer a template to inspire the creation of many more.