Poverty is often framed in numbers: national income thresholds, unemployment rates, or per capita GDP. But for Wawira Njiru, poverty is more personal. It’s a child showing up at school too hungry to learn. It’s an empty stomach sitting in a classroom full of potential.

In 2012, Wawira was studying nutrition in Australia. During a break home in Kenya, she organised a small fundraising dinner, just one event, to support a school back in Ruiru, just outside Nairobi. The amount raised was modest, but it was enough to launch a pilot: 25 schoolchildren received one hot, nutritious meal a day.

The effect was immediate. Teachers noticed a difference within days. Pupils who had struggled to stay awake were suddenly more alert. Attendance picked up. Children who had been skipping school altogether came back.

In the highlands of Ethiopia, farming has always been the heart of rural life. Most families rely on small plots to feed themselves and to earn what little they can. For generations, farmers have worked hard, planting, tending, and hoping for rain. But yields stayed low, and so did incomes. Crops failed often. Seeds were poor quality. Tools were basic. Even the hardest-working farmers found themselves stuck in the same cycle: survive, not succeed.

That began to change after 2015, when an Israeli non-profit called Fair Planet arrived with a new approach. They weren’t bringing handouts. They weren’t building large-scale industrial farms. What they offered was smaller, smarter, and more sustainable: better seeds and better training, delivered through local people, using existing farming systems.

For many countries, achieving near-universal access to childhood vaccines remains a long-term goal. For Rwanda, it became a non-negotiable.

Back in 2015, Rwanda already had one of the highest routine childhood immunisation rates in sub-Saharan Africa. National figures sat around 98 per cent. But averages don’t tell the full story. Beneath the surface, gaps remained. Some communities, particularly in remote hills and displaced settlements, were still being left behind.

The government took this seriously. They recognised that health outcomes are only as strong as the hardest-to-reach person in the system. So they focused on filling the final gaps, not just expanding coverage, but ensuring equity.

In the dusty hills of Rajasthan, the school enrolment numbers once looked better on paper than they did in real life. Officially, millions of children were in school. But many girls, particularly in tribal and remote districts like Banswara, were not. They were fetching water. Caring for siblings. Or being prepared for early marriage.

Education was technically available. But for girls in these communities, access was not the same as inclusion.

In 2015, Educate Girls, a non-profit founded by Safeena Husain, launched an ambitious new model. The goal was to bring out-of-school girls back into the system and keep them there long enough to finish primary school. The strategy was simple, local, and scalable.

In Bundelkhand, a drought-prone region straddling the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, water scarcity is a daily battle. For generations, women have shouldered the burden, walking long distances, waiting hours at dried-up wells, carrying heavy loads home. But when it came to deciding how water was managed, women had no voice.

That began to change after 2015 with the rise of the Jal Sahelis, which means “friends of water.” This grassroots collective of women came together not just to collect water   but to take control of how it was sourced, distributed and protected.

The movement started in small steps. A group of women in Lalitpur district noticed that the village pond had dried up. Instead of waiting for outside help, they cleaned it themselves. They convinced the panchayat (village council) to release funds to desilt it. That success gave them confidence. And momentum.

In the far north of Uganda, close to the South Sudan border, lies Moyo Town, a fast-growing community of nearly 30,000 people. But until recently, most of those residents had no access to clean, piped water.

Before 2020, only about 500 households were connected to the town’s ageing supply network. Everyone else, including refugee families, schoolchildren and traders, relied on swamps, unprotected springs or shallow wells. These sources were unreliable, easily contaminated, and located far from home. Collecting water took hours. Outbreaks of cholera and diarrhoea were common. The problem was urgent, but it had been ignored for too long.

That changed in 2020, when Uganda’s Ministry of Water and Environment, with funding from the German development bank KfW, launched a major upgrade of Moyo’s water infrastructure. The project wasn’t flashy. It didn’t involve high-tech equipment. But it was well planned, community-focused, and built to last.

Galena is a small village on the Yukon River in interior Alaska. It has just 400 residents, bitterly cold winters, and some of the highest energy costs in the United States. For years, Galena ran entirely on diesel, flown in by plane or barged upriver in warmer months. The system was costly, fragile, and polluting.

When a power outage in 2015 caused frozen pipes in the middle of winter, local resident Eric Huntington had had enough. His family was spending over $7,000 a year on diesel just to heat and power their modest home. The situation wasn’t sustainable, financially or physically.

Eric wasn’t the only one thinking about change. Tim Kalke, general manager of a local nonprofit called SEGA (Sustainable Energy for Galena, Alaska), had been looking for alternatives. SEGA had already managed the village’s biomass plant, which was heating the Galena Interior Learning Academy with local wood chips since 2016. But Kalke and Huntington knew that heating was only one piece of the puzzle. The community still needed a long-term source of affordable electricity.

That’s when the idea of building a solar microgrid took shape.

When Regina Honu graduated with a computer science degree in Ghana, she was ready to enter the workforce. But she quickly discovered that her qualifications weren’t enough to overcome outdated perceptions. Hiring managers saw her gender before they saw her skill. Doors didn’t open. Interviews turned cold. People were surprised that she even knew how to code.

Instead of giving up, she decided to build something of her own.

In 2016, Regina launched Soronko Academy  the first coding and digital skills academy for girls and young women in West Africa. She started in Accra, working with local schools and community centres to offer free and low-cost training. Her mission was simple: to give young women the skills, confidence and opportunity to enter the tech industry, or to create their own business if the industry refused to hire them.

In many parts of Nigeria, power cuts are not just inconvenient, they are expected. For millions of households and businesses, reliable electricity has always been out of reach. Instead, people rely on noisy diesel generators that are expensive to run, toxic to breathe, and dangerous for the environment.

Sandra Chukwudozie grew up watching this reality unfold and decided it didn’t have to stay that way.

In 2017, she founded Salpha Energy, a clean energy company focused on providing affordable, reliable, solar-powered products for homes and small businesses across Nigeria. She had worked with the United Nations and in the oil and gas industry. But she wanted to build something different: a business that didn’t just make clean energy accessible, but that created opportunity as it grew.

In 2016, Mursal Hedayat was living in London, with a university degree and a strong sense of purpose. But something wasn’t sitting right. Her mother, a qualified civil engineer, had arrived in the UK as a refugee, and despite her education and experience, she couldn’t find work. The system simply didn’t recognise her value.

Mursal, herself a former refugee from Afghanistan, saw that her mother’s story was far from unique. Many refugees had been doctors, teachers, architects or lawyers. But when they arrived in a new country, those skills were overlooked. Qualifications weren’t recognised. Experience was dismissed. The result was isolation, wasted potential and a quiet sense of exclusion.

So Mursal decided to do something practical. In 2018, she launched Chatterbox, a social enterprise that hires refugees as online language tutors. It was a simple idea with powerful logic: many refugees are multilingual.

In the Wood Green neighbourhood of North London, tucked between housing estates and busy roads, stood a forgotten place. The Wolves Lane Horticultural Centre had once been a thriving nursery run by the local authority. But by 2015, the gates were locked, the buildings were crumbling, and the surrounding community, one of London’s most diverse and underserved, had no access to what should have been a public asset.

That’s when a group of local organisations came together and asked a different question: what if this wasn’t just a neglected council property? What if it could become a hub for food, education, sustainability and belonging?

From that question came action. Groups like The Ubele Initiative, Black Rootz, and OrganicLea brought together their knowledge of food justice, youth empowerment and cooperative land use. Rather than wait for outside funding or council-led redevelopment, they stepped in and reclaimed the site from the bottom up.

In the Belgian city of Mechelen, organic waste made up more than half of what residents were throwing in the bin. Food scraps, garden trimmings, coffee grounds, all ending up in incinerators or landfill, despite their value as compost. And in many neighbourhoods, especially those with narrow streets or high-density housing, there was no separate collection for this kind of waste.

But where most people saw a logistical problem, Loes Vandecasteele, the city’s project coordinator for environment and sustainability, saw something else: potential.

In 2020, Loes helped launch a practical idea rooted in local action. She designed a community composting scheme that didn’t rely on big trucks or expensive infrastructure. Instead, it would be led by residents, supported by small grants, and built with reclaimed materials and public trust.

Paris is a city known for its architecture, its history, and its wide boulevards, not for its heat. But over the past decade, the French capital has experienced a steady rise in extreme summer temperatures. Heatwaves lasting days, sometimes weeks, now hit the city each year. The hardest-hit? Children in schools with no shade, no greenery, and entire playgrounds covered in blacktop.

In 2023, Ghid Karam, a climate scientist and community organiser, had seen enough. She joined forces with teachers, parents, local officials and landscape architects to launch the OASIS Schoolyard Project, a plan to transform asphalt schoolyards into cool, green, and inclusive urban spaces.

OASIS stands for “Open, Adaptable, Social, Inclusive and Sustainable.” But the idea was simple: if we can’t control the city’s temperature, we can at least make sure children have a place to stay safe, play, and learn during extreme heat.

The Philippines is home to one of the most biologically rich marine environments in the world. But for decades, overfishing, coral bleaching, pollution, and illegal practices like dynamite fishing have threatened its coastlines. In many areas, marine life declined sharply. Local fishers were catching less, travelling farther, and struggling to earn a living.

But along the shores of Palawan, a quiet kind of protection has taken root. It doesn’t come from national navy patrols or big-budget conservation programmes. It comes from Bantay Dagat, community-based “sea wardens” who volunteer their time, boats, and knowledge to protect the ocean they depend on.

The Bantay Dagat programme started in the 1990s as a response to illegal fishing. But in the past decade, it has evolved into something far more impactful, a people-powered system for marine ecosystem protection, resource monitoring, education and law enforcement.

In the early 2000s, the soil at Knepp Estate in West Sussex was tired. After decades of intensive agriculture, the land was dry, compacted and unproductive. Despite new technology and government subsidies, yields were poor and the wildlife once common in the area, nightingales, turtle doves, butterflies, bats, had all but vanished.

Charlie Burrell, who inherited the 3,500-acre estate, knew something had to change. Together with his wife, Isabella Tree, he made a decision that many at the time found shocking: they stopped farming.

But what followed wasn’t abandonment, it was rewilding.

Rather than plough or plant, the couple allowed natural processes to return. They introduced free-roaming animals, longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies, Tamworth pigs and red and fallow deer, to act as proxies for extinct herbivores. These animals shaped the land by grazing, rooting and trampling. Wetlands were allowed to re-form.

In Barcelona, like in many global cities, residents often felt distant from the decisions that shaped their streets, parks, and public services. City budgets were debated behind closed doors. Community consultations were limited. People wanted a say but didn’t know where to begin.

That changed in 2015 with the arrival of Barcelona en Comú, a citizen-led movement that swept into city government. At its centre was former housing activist Ada Colau, who became mayor. One of her team’s first priorities was to build a better form of local democracy, one that didn’t just ask residents what they wanted but gave them tools to decide.

The result was Decidim, a digital platform for participatory democracy, launched in 2016. The name means “we decide” in Catalan. And that’s exactly what it enabled people to do.

Partnership is often talked about in vague terms, memorandums of understanding, development frameworks, aligned objectives. But in the hills of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and the classrooms of West Yorkshire, England, it means something very different. It means real students, real teachers, and a shared goal: to grow together, through sport and education.

That goal is the heart of the Bambisanani Partnership, a collaboration that began in 2006 between St Mary’s Catholic Academy in Menston, UK, and Mnyakanya High School in rural South Africa. The name means “working hand in hand” in Zulu. And over the years, that’s exactly what the partnership has done.

What started as a simple cultural exchange has grown into a multi-stakeholder programme involving schools, universities, local government, sports bodies and youth organisations. Its focus is not just on sharing resources, but on building mutual leadership, respect, and opportunity.