People Fixing the World

If you had a rare disease and the only drug that could help you suddenly shot up in price how would you feel? What if your health service or insurer decided it was too expensive and they wouldn’t fund it any more? This is the problem facing some patients in the Netherlands. In order to encourage pharmaceutical companies to invest in developing drugs for rare diseases, the EU allows them to have a...

Using lasers or asteroids to move our planet away from the sun may sound extreme, but a few scientists have come up with plans to do just that. The sun’s power is slowly increasing. Over the next billion years or so, the extra energy is going to boil off the oceans and make the earth inhospitable. Given the timescales involved, you might think this is someone else’s problem. But such is the human...

Catch up with the goats fighting forest fires in Spain and discover where else in the world they’re being used. This programme looks at what happened next to some of the people and projects we have featured in past episodes. We also revisit a scheme in Greece that’s helping people give their leftover medicines to those who can’t afford to buy them. And we check in with Majd Mashharawi who had foun...

We look at four clever ways to reduce carbon emissions from deliveries. Shops, offices, restaurants and homes all get lots of them every day, and this so-called “last mile” in the logistics chain can be responsible for up to 50% of our goods’ shipping carbon footprint… so what can we do to reduce it? While technology may provide part of the answer, there are also ways to radically reorganise the f...

Rapists often avoid conviction and people they’ve attacked can face a traumatic journey through the legal system. But special reporting centres and courts in South Africa are improving things. The country has set up Thuthuzela Centres which are named after a Xhosa word meaning comfort. The centres aim to create a safe, empathetic and comfortable environment where people who have been raped can get...

Uganda has a very young population – the median age is 16 and young people find it hard to get a job. So now children are being taught how to run their own businesses before they leave school. They learn about profit and loss, how to get investment, leadership and practical skills, such as making bags and charcoal briquettes for the communities where they live. Uganda has a reputation as an entrep...

Global warming is melting the world's glaciers and sea ice. In Iceland the effects can already be seen - people there recently held a funeral to mark the death of the Okjokull glacier. So scientists and engineers around the world are trying to come up with ideas to cool the planet and stop the ice from melting. One wants to spray sea water into clouds to make them whiter so they reflect more of th...

Almost 30% of women experience violence from a partner at some point in their lives. If they manage to escape the immediate crisis, it can be hard to get long term support to rebuild their lives, and survivors often continue to be harassed and threatened for years after leaving their abusers. A security dog firm in Spain is giving these people the confidence to restart their lives by pairing them...

Fires are common in South Africa’s informal settlements - it’s estimated that there are about 5,000 every year. They’re often caused by faulty wiring or open flames used for cooking or heating. Because the shacks are crammed in so tightly the flames can spread with frightening speed and destroy hundreds of homes. So a group of entrepreneurs invented a smart fire alarm for just these sorts of place...

Bananas are one of the most popular fruits on the planet - more than 100 million tonnes of them are eaten every year. But on banana plantations on four continents, a deadly fungus is creeping through the soil and destroying the plants. Some say the end is nigh for the banana. But from Australia to Colombia and from the Philippines to the Netherlands, work is going on to stop that happening. We mee...

Billions of tonnes of goods are moved by lorry every year – everything from food and clothes to building materials, electronic gadgets and toys. Most heavy-duty vehicles run on diesel and they account for a quarter of the EU’s CO2 emissions from road transport. But making eco-friendly lorries and trucks is challenging. Big vehicles need big batteries, which currently take too long to charge and ta...

Video games are often blamed for time-wasting and violence, but there’s a group of people proving this stereotype wrong. We meet the scientists behind a game designed to speed up finding a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, and we speak to a teenager who plays it because “it’s something I can do to help people in my spare time”. Citizen science projects like this have had some remarkable successes...

The city of Vaasa in western Finland has built a reputation as a centre of innovation, where energy companies are working together to try to find solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems. Here, there’s a quiet conviction that climate change can be stopped and a belief that technology emerging from this area will help us make the shift to renewable forms of energy. We meet the people behin...

Imagine a grocery shop selling all your basic goods at a discounted price… and if you buy enough you also get free health insurance. It might seem too good to be true, but stores like this have been introduced at some factories in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Social entrepreneur Saif Rashid is trying to get better health care to some of the millions of garment factory workers who are on low wages. For them,...

Where there are humans, there’s waste. About two billion tonnes of garbage was produced in 2016, and the amount we generate is increasing. A lot of it ends up in unmanaged dumps or landfill sites. Much of it can’t be reused or recycled, but instead of seeing it go to “waste” some cement factories are using it to create energy. In this episode, People Fixing the World also looks at how tourists can...

If you have a cardiac arrest you need help immediately to have any chance of surviving. That’s why emergency call operators ask questions specifically designed to identify the condition, ideally within 90 seconds. Panicked and emotional callers don't always give simple answers, though, and evidence suggests cardiac arrests go unidentified in at least a quarter of emergency calls. In Denmark, a tea...

It's estimated that a person dies from a snakebite every five minutes. Many more people face life-changing injuries, losing limbs and consequently their livelihoods. Antivenoms are expensive to make and are in short supply, particularly in remote communities where they are needed the most. And what’s more, snakebites in different parts of the world need different types of antivenoms. Many of the c...

For the past 20 years, police chiefs and policy makers around the world have been fascinated by an idea: that violence spreads through cities like a disease, with patterns of clustering and transmission, and opportunities to inoculate communities against it. Violence-reduction programmes, influenced by epidemiology, have been implemented in Chicago, Glasgow and - most recently - London. But before...

In the 1970s hundreds of thousands of wells were dug across Bangladesh to give people access to cholera-free water. But this led to what the World Health Organization has called the largest mass poisoning of a population in history, worse than Chernobyl. That’s because the water in the wells wasn’t tested for arsenic. Decades on, it’s a major problem. The WHO says more than 35 million Bangladeshis...

Pollution, overfishing and oxygen depletion are damaging coastal waters across the world. Often fish and other marine life are the victims, but scientists are using one surprising creature to help solve the problem – the oyster. Oysters eat some chemical pollutants and fight algae blooms, which can have a damaging effect on biodiversity. A group of teachers and scientists in New York is trying to...

Concrete is the most used man-made product in the world but it comes with a heavy environmental price. Between 5% and 7% of the world's annual carbon emissions come from producing the cement that glues concrete together. Most of these climate-changing gases are released when a vital ingredient, limestone, is melted down in the manufacturing process. But one company has devised a new type of cement...

For the growing number of working women in Dhaka, commuting to work can be a challenge. The traffic is terrible and cars and taxis are expensive. Public transport is not only inconvenient, it is sometimes unsafe - many women face unwanted sexual attention on buses. So after his wife was harassed by a taxi driver, one young entrepreneur set up a motorbike ride-share service with a difference. Not o...

For most of human history, pumping carbon dioxide into the air has come free of charge. Burning fossil fuels powered the industrial revolution and powers most industries to this day. But all that carbon stays up in the atmosphere and dealing with the consequences won’t be free. The cost of climate change stretches beyond the lives lost in natural disasters. There will be a huge economic cost - to...

In the US most people who are charged with a crime can’t afford expensive lawyers and investigators to prepare their case. The public defenders who represent them usually have heavy workloads and limited resources. Family and friends would often like to help but don’t know how. So a group in California is trying to make things fairer by teaching them how the legal system works and explaining what...

It’s estimated that more than 100 million girls under the age of 18 will be married in the next decade. One country that’s trying to end the practice of child marriage is Ethiopia. There, the Berhane Hewan programme, meaning ‘Light for Eve’ in Amharic, promises families a solar-powered light if their daughter remains unmarried and in school until she’s at least 18. This approach is known as a cond...