Trained rats, elephant pepper + sport fishing

The World Bank is funding a development project which will use trained rats to detect tuberculosis in the saliva of people in Tanzania.

The powerful sense of smell + trainability of rats has already been used, by an NGO called Apopo, to detect landmines in Mozambique.

Teams of trained rats will enable doctors to screen large numbers of people for TB, with a high level of accuracy, and to identify patients at early stages in the disease when they will respond better to treatment.

Other funded projects include:

The Taimen Conservation Fund in Mongolia, which will use it's money to organise a sport fishing scheme designed to conserve both traditional human communities + threatened habitats.

In Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique the Elephant Pepper project will promote the cultivation of chili as lucrative cash crop + a deterrent for elephants and buffalo.

Follow this link to find out about all of the other projects given up to $250,000 by the World Bank's Development Market scheme.