Stay ConnectedDiscover the people and the projects trying to make the world a better place.
A weekly programme looking at common challenges around the world and the creative ways people are trying to tackle them.
Presenter Myra Anubi speaks to reporters, experts and innovators to investigate how effective different solutions are, share their successes and inspire listeners with what is possible.
Copyright: © (C) BBC 2022
Lurking in the sewers beneath the streets there are giant blobs of congealed cooking fat known as “fatbergs”. Now one company has come up with a clever way of making money out of them. Their efforts may one day change perceptions of fatbergs – turning the lumps of putrid waste into a valuable commodity.
Presenter: Tom Colls Reporter: Nick Holland
(Image: A fatberg, Credit: Thames Water)
Thailand in the 1960s was on the verge of a population disaster. Thai women were having seven children on average, and the government was struggling to raise living conditions. Mechai Viravaidya, a young economist who moonlighted as a soap actor, newspaper columnist and teacher, made it his mission to get family planning into every village in Thailand - he wanted to make condoms as easily accessible as vegetables.
Mechai realised he could use humour to break down Thai reservations about contraception, launching condom blowing competitions and condom beauty pageants. His efforts were so successful, condoms became known as “Mechais” in Thai, and he was nicknamed “The Condom King” or “Mr Condom”. When the HIV/Aids crisis threatened to engulf Thailand in early 1990s, Mechai, now a government minister, launched a mass media campaign promoting condom use and made condoms available everywhere, from massage parlours to bus stops. It is estimated these preventative measures saved 7.7 million lives. We find out what lessons we can learn from his 45 years of campaigning. Presented by Mai Noman.
Presenter: Mai Noman Reporter: Ruth Evans Producer: Charlotte Pritchard
There are more than 200,000 women in US prisons and jails and it is estimated that 6% to 10% are pregnant. One project in Minnesota is trying to use these pregnancies to change the lives of the women, and their children, for the better. We go to jail with the Minnesota Prison Doula Project to see how it works.
Presenter: Mukul Devichand Reporter: Sahar Zand Producer: William Kremer
Globally, only around 20% of clothes are re-used or recycled. The majority go to landfill or are incinerated. In the USA alone, the amount of clothes being thrown away has doubled in the last two decades. In World Hacks this week we meet the Scandinavian entrepreneurs trying to change this. Could a solution to this waste be to give people the option of renting clothes, so they don’t hoard things they rarely wear? Or how about clothes you can throw away guilt free, because they are fully compostable?
Presenter: Mukul Devichand Reporter: Dougal Shaw
Image: Man wearing boxer shorts / Credit: Houdini
Road accidents are the single largest cause of death amongst young people around the world. But a project in Kenya is making impressive progress in tackling the issue. It has deployed a small and very simple weapon, which has been proven to cut bus accidents by at least a quarter – a sticker.
Also on the programme, how they’re making recreation space in Chile, but without knocking down any buildings.
Presenter: Tom Colls Producer: Harriet Noble
[Image: Mutatu buses in Kenya. Copyright: Getty Images]
Picking up money - that’s what Haitian’s nicknamed a movement seeking to solve Haiti’s plastic waste problem and reduce poverty at the same time. It was started by a man who saw a glimmer of hope in the devastation wrought by the 2010 earthquake: plastic bottles were clogging the beaches and filling the oceans with rubbish. But what if you could clear up the trash, give Haitians employment, and reduce the reliance on “virgin” plastic, all at the same time? It’s a bold idea that aims to solve two of the World’s big problems – poverty and plastic in the ocean. And it all hinges on attaching social value to recycled plastic. So why aren’t more companies doing it?
Presenter: Sahar Zand Reporter: Gemma Newby
(Image: Plastic rubbish on beach in Haiti, Credit: BBC)
Fariel Salahuddin is not the type of person you’d expect to see wandering around rural Pakistan, especially with a herd of goats. She’s a successful energy consultant who has worked around the world. But when she returned to where she grew up, Pakistan, Fariel decided she wanted to work on smaller projects to try to make an immediate impact and provide solar energy to poor, rural communities. This was all very well, until she realised these places didn’t have water, let alone power. What they did have was goats. Fariel developed an innovative scheme to trade what the villagers have in plentiful supply for something they desperately needed: goats for water. But what was Fariel going to do with all her newly acquired goats?
Presenter: Mukul Devichand Reporters: Secunder Kermani and Dougal Shaw Producer: Charlotte Pritchard
Image: Goats in rural Pakistan / Credit: BBC
What do you do in a medical emergency when the equivalent of 999 or 911 simply doesn’t exist? After spending time in countries that lack public ambulance services, US paramedic Jason Friesen realised the problem wasn’t a lack of sophisticated ambulances, or the hi-tech medical equipment inside them, but the communication system necessary to get an injured person from A to B in time to save their life.
In the Dominican Republic there are no public ambulances but now, in two rural areas, first responders respond to a medical emergency as fast as any ambulance service in the developed world. And all it takes is one smartphone, a handful of willing volunteers, and an Uber-like text system that crowdsources help when disaster strikes.
And Dougal Shaw meets the man who is pioneering a way to use recycled plastic to make stronger, longer lasting roads.
Presenter: Sahar Zand Reporters: Gemma Newby, Dougal Shaw.
Image: First responders in the back of an ambulance / Credit: BBC
This is a story about what happens to your body after you die. In many countries, the current options are burial and cremation, but, both methods come with significant environmental impacts. We’re running out of space for burial in many places, and cremation carries the risk of toxins and greenhouse gases being released. For World Hacks, Sahar Zand travels to the US, where they’re using a new process to deal with the dead. It’s been called “green cremation,” “water cremation” or “resomation” and uses alkaline hydrolysis to mimic and accelerate the breakdown of tissue that would occur in burial. Those who invented the process say it’s an environmentally friendly way to address this fundamental moment in the human life-cycle, but does the evidence stack up?
Reporter: Sahar Zand Presenter Mukul Devichand
Image: A resomation machine / Caption: BBC
How do you fulfil your sexual needs if you have a disability? How do you masturbate if you have limited use of your hands? These are problems that most able-bodied people have probably never considered. But if you’re in this position it’s something you probably think about a lot. And it’s a problem which Vincent, the founder of a small NGO called Hand Angels, is trying to help with. His group matches volunteers with disabled people to provide a sexual service. Mukul Devichand and Alvaro Alvarez go to Taiwan to hear the remarkably frank stories of the volunteers and the receivers at the service. They open up a world of deep disappointment of those people who haven’t experienced sex or intimacy and an organisation that thinks it has the solution. But can any service ever fill this gap or is it just a shallow fix.
Presenter: Mukul Devichand
Image: Vincent – the founder of ‘Hand Angels’ / Credit: BBC
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