Ida Karpinska, head of the Kwiat Kobiecosci was only able to fully recover from the tumour because it was detected early enough through regular cervical screening. Unfortunately, the majority of women in Poland skip these prophylactic tests, and when Ida realized this...

Zeina was determined to help cultivate the talents of unprivileged youths when she founded “The Nawaya Project” in 2012, an innovative non-governmental organisation (NGO) that helps marginalised youth develop their talent so that they can integrate into the workforce....

Merry is usually up before the sun, when she and her 11 colleagues are driven to work. Her job, detecting landmines and other unexploded ordnance (UXO), requires a laser-like focus. It also helps that at about 1kg in weight, she is very light of foot and does not set...

The Gourga forest region stretches across 24ha, 184km to the north of Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. Even in the dry season, the vegetation in this part of the north is intriguing - a forest in a so-called arid zone. A steady decrease in rainfall over...

Even air pollution can yield something positive, such as art. Just ask Graviky Labs, a Bengaluru-based start-up which has come up with an innovative method to trap soot from vehicles and transform it into ink. The team of industrial and automobile engineers, computer...

The people of the El Hencha, a small town not far from Sfax, Tunisia, continue to practise traditional agricultural techniques for which they need to draw heavily upon groundwater reserves. These practices are typical of those found in areas across southern Tunisia,...

Ms Jessi Baker, the founder of blockchain technology platform Provenance, envisions a future where all physical products have digital histories, allowing people to trace and verify products' origins, attributes and ownership. Fuelled by frustration about how little we...

In 1997, a group of 14 women got together to open a plastic waste processing facility in Thies, 70km east of Dakar, under the supervision of an Italian non-governmental organisation. The rise in recycling activity led to the creation of the company Proplast in March...

If the banana trees at Zoo Zurich are particularly lush, it is thanks to a fertiliser with an unusual ingredient: human waste. During spring in 2016, zoo employees cleared a bamboo grove in Zurich's Masoala Rainforest to plant the trees. Within a few months, the...

Wasting food is far from being a negligible problem, both in Brazil and worldwide. According to United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization, global food loss and waste amounts to about one-third of all food produced. Brazil is among the top ten food-wasting...

Kutumbita is a tech start-up that aims to empower workers in the garment industry through an application designed to foster clear and equitable communication between employer and employee in firms which are too large for traditional communication channels. Using...

Mr Michihiko Iwamoto worked for a textile trading house that produced work clothes with threads made from PET bottles. This gave him the idea that one could "circulate everything" by returning all used items to their original state and putting them into new products...

For six years, a married homeless couple were separated and forced to live apart in Delhi, India. The husband was in one gender-segregated communal shelter and the wife in another. Last year, for the first time, they were able to move into their own “home”. Their new...

Doing good comes with great rewards. This is the philosophy that keeps Cropital - a crowdfunding platform put up by a group of Filipino millennials to help local farmers - running. Since its launch in November 2015, Cropital has provided financial support to around...

When Mr Ladislav Brazdil bought an old collective farm with a partner after the Czech revolution, what he really wanted was to engineer and market his own product. His dream became reality when a design engineer asked him about an idea he had in mind: an urban...

After nearly three decades in which it stayed shut because of the Taleban's ban on music, the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (Anim) re-opened in 2010, keen to rekindle a musical teaching tradition. Now, it teaches courses in both classical Western and Eastern...

Sheroes Hangout, with its tasteful decor and lively graffiti, is tucked away between some nondescript eateries, across from a five-star luxury hotel. In Agra, famous as the city of the Taj Mahal, the cafe is on the map for a unique reason: It is run by women who have...

Sisters Morgan and Caitria O'Neill never expected that a tornado would hit their small home town in Massachusetts - or that when it did, recovering from the disaster would change their lives. On June 1, 2011, a pair of twisters ripped across the state, damaging their...

Thirteen-year-old Yusuf Warsame shows up for school in Frederiksburg, Denmark, every day, takes part in class and gets up to pranks like any of his classmates - but he is not actually there. At home, about 3km away, Yusuf accesses and controls a robot called Beam -...