People Fixing the World

A retired police detective and a former neo-Nazi leader may seem like an unlikely partnership. But Dr Bernd Wagner and Ingo Hasselbach have taken their past differences and used them as the basis for making a real change. When Hasselbach quit neo-Nazism over two decades ago he and Wagner, who had once arrested him, realised they had a shared dream: to help far right extremists change their ways. P...

In 1998, 42% of Iceland’s 15 and 16 year-olds reported that they had got drunk in the past 30 days. By 2016, though, this figure had fallen to just 5% and drug use and smoking had also sharply declined. The action plan that led to this dramatic success is sometimes called “the Icelandic Model” – and strikingly, it does not focus on tighter policing or awareness campaigns to warn children off bad h...

Thousands of places in the world don't officially exist on a map. If you're not on a map, it can have implications for how people find you - in times of disaster for example. But a project called Missing Maps is solving that, by using the power of volunteers to make 'invisible people, visible'. At a mapathon in London, volunteers are sitting around their laptops plotting the world. And then in Mal...

to stop people getting caught short. What do you do if you're out and about and can't find a public toilet? Do you sneak into a cafe and hope no one notices, buy something you don't want just for the privilege of using the facilities, or hold it in until you can get home? The number of public toilets around the world is decreasing, making this an increasingly common dilemma. But not in many parts...

Around 75% of the world's population, approximately 4 billion people, don't have an address. Take a country like Mongolia, with a largely nomadic population, where street names and postcodes can be few and far between. But that could all be changing thanks to just three words. Mongolia's Postal Service was the first in the world to sign up to What3Words, an idea from a British former music executi...

Although Iceland is thought to be the best country in the world for gender equality, it lags behind in one metric: the gender pay gap. So a decade ago the country's unions and business community came together to try something new. They devised a management standard to help organisations implement equal pay. Now the government has gone a step further and introduced a law that from January will forc...

It looks like the set of Game of Thrones. Once a year Wolin in Poland hosts a huge Viking festival - with a twist. Enthusiasts come from around the world not just to re-enact battles, but to win them, fighting competitively. One organiser of these battles has found that this Viking scene can offer positive benefits to men who have been defined by violence in their past, and are now looking for a w...

It’s not usually a good idea to take selfies of your private parts, but what if those photos could save your life? A new, tiny medical device is being used across Africa to detect cervical cancer from a mobile phone photograph. In Gambia, doctors are often in short supply, but nurses, midwives and smartphones are widely available, allowing patients to be diagnosed and treated remotely. In sub Saha...

Humanity’s hunger for meat is not good for the planet. Every cow, pig and fish that farmers rear has an environmental cost – particularly in the land and water resources it takes to grow the food the animals eat. But one entrepreneur is developing a solution – create animal feed from methane gas. Using methane-eating bacteria, they have developed animal feed that uses a fraction of the land and wa...

Local currencies – money you can only spend at small local businesses – aim to keep money in their neighbourhood and out of the hands of big corporations and their shareholders. Now they are going digital, with local currencies that live only on smartphone money apps. Could it make them a financial force to be reckoned with? Presenter: India Rakusen Reporter: Dougal Shaw Image: A local digital cur...

Each year around 100,000 women die due to heavy bleeding after giving birth. But help is at hand from an unexpected source: condoms. World Hacks goes to a maternity hospital in Kenya to speak to the medical staff using this super-cheap kit that is saving lives. Also on the programme, the US start-up that is asking volunteers to donate their voices, then transforming them into personalised, digital...

Antibiotic resistant superbugs are a huge problem both in humans and in animals. Many animals reared for food are routinely fed antibiotics to prevent infections. Farmers across the world do it to protect their livestock and to safeguard their incomes. But some bugs are becoming resistant to these drugs because of their overuse – fuelling the rise of animal “superbugs” like MRSA that could potenti...

The availability of blood for transfusions saves lives after difficult births and operations. But in much of the developing world, hospitals have a blood shortage. One entrepreneur in Nigeria is working on a solution. She has developed an app that connects blood banks to hospitals, and has built a network of moped drivers to ferry blood around Lagos, the largest city in the country. World Hacks in...

How do you help female doctors get back to work when they've given up medicine to look after their families? It's a particular problem in Pakistan where the majority of medical graduates are women who stop working after they get married. Now a scheme has been set up employing them to hold video clinics with patients over the internet, enabling them to work flexibly from home. What's more they're a...

Is a new urban cable car in Mexico more than just a means of public transport? As well as ferrying thousands of people a day, it's been strategically located to link up the poorest neighbourhoods to more affluent parts of the city. It's hoped it will bring growth to a forgotten district, reduce crime and become a means of bridging the social divide. World Hacks travels to Mexico City to see if it...

Around the world, governments and researchers are experimenting with the introduction of universal basic income. From Finland and Spain to India, the idea of giving every citizen – whether working or not – a set amount of money per month is gaining momentum. It’s claimed to be a fairer and more efficient way of running a welfare system, but we’re only just starting to understand what actually happ...

Darius has been shot three separate occasions, but the third time was the last. He was met at his bedside by a stranger, who changed his life forever. Victims of violence are, far more likely to be shot, stabbed or violently assaulted a second or third time - as the perpetrators of violence try to silence the victim. In San Francisco, where Darius lived, specially trained case managers visit victi...

How do you get children who're victims of emotional abuse or physical harm to open up about what's happened to them? In Mexico a psychologist, Julia Borbolla, encourages them to have a one-to-one chat with a cartoon alien that appears on a video screen in a room near her office. What the children don't realise is Julia hears every word of their conversation with the animated creature because she's...

Methane emissions from the burps and farts of livestock accounts for around 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions. But the trick to reducing this could lie with some of Kenya’s smallholder farmers. By using very simple techniques to transform the way they manage their soil and animals, dairy farmers are helping their cows emit less methane per litre of milk they produce. And it’s all being paid f...

World Hacks goes to Thailand to meet an army of volunteers on the front line in the fight against dangerous diseases, like Ebola and bird flu. Nearly 100 years ago Spanish Flu infected a third of the world’s population and killed about 50 million people. With increased international travel, growing populations and environmental damage, experts warn that viruses now have the potential to spread fas...

A new school in San Francisco thinks it can massively accelerate the speed at which children can learn, using clever technology and smart algorithms to offer each child a bespoke education. AltSchool believes it can achieve results that were only previously possible by giving individual children their own personal tutor. The firm currently runs eight small ‘lab schools’ dotted around the country,...

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 accessib...

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 t...