People Fixing the World

Clearing up pollution can be a messy and expensive task, but around the world people are harnessing the power of plants to do the job for them.We hear how water hyacinths are going from hated weed to providing communities with a greener water filtration solution; how plants in the Niger Delta are helping rejuvenate land drenched in oil and devastated by fire and ask whether plants could be the future to more environmentally friendly mining.Presenter: Myra Anubi Reporter: Georgina Rannard Reporter/producer: Lizzy McNeill Producer: Zoe Gelber Series producer: Tom Colls Sound mix: Hal Haines Editor: Penny MurphyEmail: peoplefixingtheworld@bbc.co.ukImage: A water hyacinth (Getty Images)

Australia used to be one of the most linguistically diverse places, with over 200 languages. Today, many of Australia’s indigenous languages are considered “highly endangered”. Inspired by his native language, Hebrew, Ghil’ad Zuckermann is a linguistics professor who is on a mission to revive Australia’s dead and endangered languages, painstakingly piecing them back together from historical documents. We speak to Ghil’ad and Shania Richards from the Barngarla community, whose language is being brought back from the brink. Presenter: Myra Anubi Reporter/producer: Josephine Casserly Producers: Claire Bates & Craig Langran Series producer: Tom Colls Sound mix: Annie Gardiner Editor: Penny MurphyEmail: peoplefixingtheworld@bbc.co.uk Image: Shania Richards from the Barngarla community

Chile is in the midst of a “megadrought” – year after year of low rainfall which has turned farmland to desert and left communities struggling to survive.But in the midst of the crisis, people in Chile have found ingenious ways of collecting, saving and cleaning water.We visit the hillside fog nets, AI powered irrigation system and a high-tech desalination plant that are helping people survive and thrive when the rains don’t come.Presenter: Myra Anubi Reporter/Producer: Jane Chambers Series producer: Tom Colls Sound Mix: Gareth Jones Editor: Penny MurphyEmail: peoplefixingtheworld@bbc.co.ukImage: Daniel Rojas and his fog nets

A charity in the UK is building micro-homes to help homeless people transition into housing. The podcast also discusses the success and challenges of micro homes in Cambridge and explores modular microhomes as a stepping stone to independence. Additionally, it highlights a program in Belgium that encourages sobriety at parties with the use of sober coins.

In many communities grandmothers have a great influence on their families and communities. In Senegal we visit a project using grandmothers to give vital health information to adolescent girls and is also empowering them to influence men to stop practices like female genital mutilation. We also tell the story of the Granny Cloud, a team of volunteer grandmothers from all over the world, who used the internet to reach out to some of the world’s poorest children. Presenter: Myra Anubi Reporter/Producer: Farhana Haider Series producer: Tom Colls Sound mix: Annie Gardiner Editor: Penny Murphy Email: peoplefixingtheworld@bbc.co.uk Image: Grandmothers and girls from the The Grandmother Project, Senegal.

Can playing board games help us fix real-world problems?All around the world, people play board games for fun. But in recent years, a new generation of designers have been creating games with a social purpose - to enable understanding about complex problems like climate change, inequality and deforestation, and collaboratively design strategies to solve them.We look at how a group of researchers from Switzerland are creating custom-made board games that help resolve environmental disputes, led by Professor Claude Garcia from ETH Zurich and Bern University of Applied Sciences. Local farmers, businesspeople and government officials play their own roles in the games – which have helped them find compromises that protect the natural world in Indonesia and the Congo Basin.And in London, we also get a first-look at Daybreak, a new cooperative board game designed by Matteo Menapace and Matt Leacock, who designed Pandemic - a game that helped people understand the spread of coronavirus. In Daybreak, they’ve used the best scientific advice to design a game where you work together to try to stop climate change in its tracks.Presenter: Myra Anubi Reporters: Lizzy McNeill and Zoe Gelber Producers: Zoe Gelber, William Kremer and Lizzy McNeill Series producer: Tom Colls Sound mix: Hal Haines Editor: Penny MurphyEmail: peoplefixingtheworld@bbc.co.ukImage: The Daybreak board game

The amount of sleep you get makes a huge difference to your life – don’t get enough and it can harm your health, productivity and decision making.But research also suggests that people on lower incomes sleep less, because of things like shift work, overcrowded housing and stress. So how do you improve the sleep of those most in need?We visit a project in the north of England which is recycling old mattresses to help sleep deprived families afford a decent slumber. Myra Anubi talks to a researcher studying the sleep of people living in informal settlements in India and are discovering the power of a little nap. And we find out about a project in Spain which is helping hospital patients sleep more soundly.Presenter: Myra Anubi Reporters: Josephine Casserly and Esperanza Escribano Producer: Craig Langran and Claire Bates Series producer: Tom Colls Sound mix: Hal Haines Editor: Penny MurphyEmail: peoplefixingtheworld@bbc.co.ukImage: A bed (Getty Images)

In 2021 a video clip showing a seemingly magical bodysuit when viral on the internet. The clip showed a man who suffered constant convulsions quelling them after activating electrical pads on the suit. Many suggested the video was a hoax, but the Molli suit is real, and it is helping people with a range of conditions from cerebral palsy to multiple sclerosis. William Kremer finds out more.Meanwhile in Japan, one rehabilitation doctor has been on a quest to design a new kind of wheelchair. People with spinal cord injuries or conditions like Parkinson’s propel the Cogy wheelchair by pedalling, not pushing with their arms – allowing them to do physiotherapy while moving around.Presenter: Myra Anubi Reporters: William Kremer and Cheng Herng Shinn Producer: Zoe Gelber Series producer: Tom Colls Sound mix: Gareth Jones Editor: Penny MurphyEmail: peoplefixingtheworld@bbc.co.ukImage: The Molli suit (Credit: Ottobock)

As the World Cup kicks off in Qatar, we look at the initiatives around the world which are using football as a way to solve problems off the pitch. We meet the people using the beautiful game to support men with their mental health in the UK, bring people together after conflict in Iraq and build the confidence of girls in the Netherlands.Presenter: Myra AnubiReporters: Jo Casserly and Craig Langran Series producer: Tom Colls Sound mix: Hal Haines Editor: Emma RipponEmail: peoplefixingtheworld@bbc.co.ukImage: Roxanne ‘Rocky’ Hehakaija

How hard is it for women to break into male-dominated jobs? We look at two projects which are helping women to increase their earnings by training them in forms of work that have traditionally been done by men. In Uganda, we meet the woman training girls in careers from mechanical engineering and welding to carpentry and construction And in India, we visit the college that trains impoverished women from around the world in the nuts and bolts of solar technology. As well as the economic benefits, by challenging the status quo these projects are also aiming to empower women and change society.Presenter: Myra Anubi Reporter/Producer: Farhana Haider India Reporter: Chhavi Sachdev Series producer: Tom Colls Sound Mix: Hal Haines Editor: Penny MurphyEmail: peoplefixingtheworld@bbc.co.ukImage: Smart Girls Uganda students working on a car, Kampala.