A partnership between two social entrepreneurs revolutionising poverty-stricken areas of Africa through health initiatives was formed in one of the final sessions at the Skoll World Forum.
Nathan Wolfe, founder of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, agreed to join forces with Skoll Award winner Bart Weetjens, founder ofApopo, during Friday's session about healthcare.
Wolfe's organisation gives hunters from rural African villages the opportunity to test the blood of their kill to ensure they do not contain any harmful disease that could be transferred to humans, which is believed to be how the HIV virus first came into existence.
Weetjens trains giant African rats to detect land mines and tuberculosis. His rats have assessed 38.5km of highway in Mozambique, cleared more than 100 land mines and explosives and helped give communities back 400 square metres of land. In half an hour, they can assess an area that would take a human land mine detector one whole day.
Following a film showing hunters who had killed giant rats to eat, Wolfe said there had never been a major study into whether they could carry new diseases.
Weetjens said his rats had never shown signs of disease and invited Wolfe to test them as a starting point for some new research.
‘What's required is a collaborative approach,' Weetjens said. 'We have to harmonise. We have 50 people training 300 rats. It would be the perfect opportunity for viral research and I'm happy to work with you on that.'
Wolfe agreed and said they would discuss it further after the forum.
It was the first of two possible collaborations formed in the session, both featuring Weetjens.
In the question and answer session, audience member Catalina Escobar Restrepo, president of the Juan Felipe Gómez Escorbar foundation, called for Weetjens to meet Colombian minister Juan Manvel Santos to discuss introducing the land mine training programme.
She told Social Enterprise that she had close contacts to the minister and that Colombia was in desperate need of an initiative like Apopo.
The session was chaired by Larry Brilliant, vice president and chief philanthropic evangelist at Google.org, and also included Gene Falk, co-founder of mothers2mothers, which supports mothers with HIV and their newborn babies, and Skoll Award winner 2008 Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health.
