By Lee Siew Hua
Senior Correspondent
siewhua@sph.com.sg

 

SQUEAMISH me. I never thought I'd find anything at all to love about rats.

But now I can call them HeroRATS, a transformational name coined by Bart Weetjens. The innovator trains giant African rats to sniff out lethal buried landmines in Mozambique, so people can move back to their land. And the nation can move on.

Mr Bart Weetjens trains African Giant Pouched Rats to detect land mines. PHOTO: LESOIR

Rats are a powerful conceptual leap from the practice of sending humans into danger with clunky mechanical detectors or dogs. The good thing is, rats are too light to trigger bombs. Maybe they are not as affectionate as dogs, but they are less pricey to house, feed and transport.

Skype-ing with Bart - a Belgian based in Tanzania but travelling in Colombia - he shows me the flipside of a problem: Opportunity.

For Bart, 43, has made a virtue of vermin, which is plentiful in the Third World. "Social change is often based on turning problems into opportunities," he remarks.

He believes new opportunities can arise from the troubles of our time: growing population, climate change, urban waste, for starters. But turning vast problems around needs an innovative spark plus heroic persistence, despite loud ridicule.

"People laugh at you in the beginning if they think it is a strange idea," he says. "But if you have persistence, the results of your action can be enormous."

An African Giant Pouched Rat is trained and handled by a Tanzanian geared in protective demining clothes and mask. PHOTO: Xavier Rossi

Supporters are certainly vital, and our homegrown Lien Centre for Social Innovation is one. Bart is one of eight winners of the centre's Lien i3 Challenge, a global contest that seeks and scales up social innovations that can impact Asia. The contest offered a S$1 million purse to spur innovative non-profits.

Winners like Bart create much impact from very little, observes chief judge Willie Cheng, who chairs the Lien Centre.

Casting light on the innovative spirit, which the Lien Centre hopes to fan, he adds: "Much of what makes a solution work is not new in itself. If it was, it would be an invention, not an innovation. Innovation occurs when someone takes an existing tool or technology and sees for the first time how it can be applied in a new way."

All the winners did that, with imagination and efficiency. They show that solutions can lie inside very messy problems. They convince us that even the small and despised things of the world may not be what they seem, if we choose to be creative and attentive.

Even rats can change the world. So what about people? There has to be a changemaker inside us.