APOPO and Virtue Ventures higlighted in BusinessWeek Magazine

In the last part of its article titled "Social Entrepreneurs Turn Business Sense to Good", BusinessWeek Magazine talks about APOPO's transformation into a social enterprise with the support of Virtue Ventures.

(...) the strains between social goals and business imperatives are showing. (...) Such strains are even more intense in fledgling social enterprises. Belgian Bart Weetjens was focused purely on altruism when he started an organization called Apopo a decade ago. It trains African giant pouch rats to sniff out land mines on former battlefields. The mines, if they remain undetected, occasionally blow up and hurt people and animals. The program was a modest success, with mine-clearing operations in Mozambique and a contract to expand into Africa's Great Lakes Region. But Apopo ran into problems when Weetjens tried to secure a more dependable source of funding. An adopt-a-rat program launched on the Internet, HeroRATS.org, failed to attract many supporters. "We're living in uncertainty," says Apopo Chief Executive Christophe Cox. "If some of the main donors drop off, then we're finished."

So Weetjens and Cox decided to run Apopo more like a business and generate their own money from operations. Earlier this year they hired Virtue Ventures, a consulting group specializing in social enterprises, to help them write a business plan. And in the summer they brought four interns from the MBA program at Oxford University to their headquarters in Tanzania to help size up their money-earning potential. Options include expanding mine-clearing operations to the Middle East, getting into the cargo-inspection business, and forging aggressively into disease detection. It turns out the rats can sniff out the presence of tuberculosis, and perhaps other diseases, at costs dramatically cheaper than traditional laboratory tests.

The pressure of switching to a for-profit model is evident during a meeting of the two founders and their student advisers in Morogoro, Tanzania. The six gather for their weekly progress discussion in the war room, where interns work in stifling heat under two fast-spinning ceiling fans. It's not clear how big the long-term cost differential will be for their rats compared with other outfits that use European-trained dogs for mine-clearing. Cox cautions against exaggerating their advantages: "We don't want to compare the worst dogs with the best rats."

Weetjens, the organization's front man, says it now looks like Apopo may continue the mine-clearing operations on a not-for-profit basis but try to turn disease detection into a profit-maker. Their tests with Tanzanian health-care clinics are producing strong results in cost and quality.

For all the challenges that Apopo faces, there is anecdotal evidence that social enterprises can grow large and balance their social and economic imperatives. But it requires a lot of time and effort.