Forget access to computers. If you ask MIT physicist Neil Gershenfeld, what people in many parts of the world need is more useful stuff. “A farmer in a rural village, a kid, needs to measure and modify the world, not just get information about it on a screen,” he told an audience at the 2006 TED conference. Gershenfeld didn’t fully appreciate that until after he launched his Fab Lab project to extend to the rest of the world some of the same tools he and his students use to do cutting-edge research, like building computers out of atomic nuclei and constructing molecules that assemble themselves into pre-designed shapes, like self-folding origami.

Currently found in more than 30 locations in 12 countries, each Fab Lab is equipped with tens of thousands of dollars in digital fabrication and communications tools that help local people solve local engineering problems through hands-on workshops. Fab Lab volunteers trained villagers in rural India to build electronics to make their diesel engines run more efficiently and chemical sensors to monitor milk for spoilage. The Fab Lab in Lyngen, Norway came up with radio transmitters for nomadic herders to keep track of their sheep and reindeer. Other labs are working on wind and solar turbines.

Some labs may need two to three years to reach the point where users can conceive of and solve problems on their own, says Amy Sun, an MIT graduate student who recently directed the installation of a Fab Lab in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, with the idea of showing that digital tools could help ordinary people solve problems in war-torn countries. Sun and her colleagues helped users build and install a series of open-source antennas for transmitting wireless internet. Sun says that users of the labs have turned a corner “of seeing access to information as a right, not a privilege that is reserved for just a few.”

Photo by Amy Sun, The Center for Bits and Atoms, MIT, 2009.

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ACCION International thinks big in very small increments. The microfinance nonprofit and its partners are trying to make loans to 6 million impoverished borrowers by 2011—roughly a hundred bucks at a time. The microloans help owners of established small businesses (from a handicraft store in Guatemala to a beverage stand in Nigeria) expand their enterprises.

They’re making good headway: In the past year, the nearly 50-year-old organization helped loan $5.14 billion to nearly 4 million people in 24 countries, mostly in Latin America. With a 97 percent repayment rate and 65 percent of the loans going to women, ACCION is arguably one of the world’s most successful microfinance organizations. In fact, President Obama recently tapped María Otero, ACCION chief executive since 2000, to become undersecretary of global affairs at the State Department.

ACCION’s primary investments are in other microfinance organizations, which it coaches to profitability. (The Boston-based institution itself only loans to low- and middle-income Americans running businesses with five employees or fewer.) ACCION also trains commercial financial institutions, such as Haiti’s largest bank, Sogebank, on how to make loans in amounts as small as $27. In a country where 80 percent of the population lives in poverty, the Haitian bank’s service arm, Sogesol, had nearly 12,000 clients with $28 million in loans disbursed by the end of 2007. To cover the cost of lending, ACCION and its more than 30 partners charge borrowers between 20 and 85 percent interest on their loans. “Making sure that microfinance institutions are profitable so that they can expand their client outreach is a key goal,” says Bruce MacDonald, ACCION’s vice president of communications.

So is leading by example though cutting-edge pilot projects. This August, ACCION will launch China’s very first microfinance program in Inner Mongolia.

CORRECTION: This piece originally identified Bruce MacDonald as Brian MacDonald.

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Popularized in the 1970s, the practice of microcredit—giving out small loans to borrowers to encourage entrepeneurship—has offered much-needed capital to small business owners who do everything from making handicrafts to selling the milk from a lone cow, and rural children who want to attend school. Here’s a look at the top 15 microcredit funds that put up the money and the top 15 nations where the recipents live. Click here to view the microfinance infographic.

A collaboration between GOOD and Fogelson-Lubliner.

A collaboration between GOOD and Fogelson-Lubliner.

When a handful of engineers can track the daily online searches of tens of millions of people (and protect their privacy) all for the betterment of humanity, one of the internet’s great potentials has been fulfilled. And that’s what Google.org, the search engine giant’s philanthropic arm, is accomplishing through its Google Flu Trends initiative, which launched last November. By identifying a correlation between spikes in the number of queries for certain terms such as “flu,” “cough,” and “chills, and upticks in the influenza cases reported by public health outlets, Google has invented a sort of cyber-epidemiology.

Billed as an early detection system for pandemics, GFT was put to the test in April as news spread worldwide about the H1N1, or swine flu, outbreak. Public health officials asked GFT to look at its search data from Mexico retroactively. While Google identified an increase in flu-related searches, Mexico doesn’t have the public health infrastructure that would have allowed it to confirm that swine flu cases were indeed piling up. “There is certainly a bump in the April time period,” says Google spokesperson Jamie Yood, “so we definitely picked something up.”

So far, GFT has detected flu trends up to two weeks sooner than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Such success has encouraged Google.org to expand the program to Australia and New Zealand and to set its sights on other countries as well—Yood wouldn’t name names, but Europe’s high rates of internet usage make it a good bet. It’s also considering how the technique might be used to track other diseases affecting large portions of the public—another initiative about which Google officials remain mum on specifics. “If it’s successful, if it’s accurate, and that’s helpful, that’s our goal,” says Yood, “to supply health officials with more information.”

Photo courtesy of Google

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Internet connections in the developing world are getting a boost thanks to a technology conceived to improve corporate IT. In Africa’s colleges, for example, internet connections are split between so many users that speeds would remind Americans of surfing on Prodigy. HashCache, a computing method developed by a team at Princeton University to store internet data in a more efficient way, could jolt those connections and cut costs.

Here’s how it works: When you call up a website, you don’t download all the content directly from the site. Rather, the request goes through a proxy server, which stores oft-accessed information on web pages—a process called “caching.” “If you go to CNN.com now and then go to CNN.com later, the proxy stores pages on CNN.com that haven’t changed,” explains Anirudh Badam, a computer science graduate student at Princeton. Proxies store data using a process involving expensive random access memory. A lot of RAM requires a bigger box, so proxies are typically large and hard to maintain.  In the developing world, one proxy typically serves multiple schools, further slowing connection speeds.

HashCache uses a more efficient method to access stored files, cutting all but a tenth of the RAM out of the caching process. This makes the information easier for multiple computers to access more quickly, speeding up slow connections and taking up less space. A push from One Laptop Per Child’s former VP of software engineering, Jim Gettys, convinced the Princeton group that the developing world needed its tech. Using HashCache, a school can use a single laptop (capable of caching the entirety of Wikipedia) as its own proxy. Universities in Ghana and Nigeria are currently using HashCache, and Badam reports that the technology is now bundled with OLPC’s efforts. “As soon as OLPC deployed, we made arrangements to deploy HashCache,” says Badam, adding that schools in Peru and Uruguay are now making arrangements to procure laptops. “By the end of August or September this year, we may make a huge deployment.”

Photo by One Laptop per Child (via Flickr)

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Sharing is part of coexisting—and that means fairly distributing land and resources, but also respecting rights and freedoms. Armed conflicts worldwide are down from a peak in the early 1990s, but we’re still enjoying an era of peace. These are the countries involved in the most skirmishes (both internal and international) since the end of World War II. Click here to see the conflict infographic.

A collaboration between GOOD and Fogelson-Lubliner.

Sixty-five miles north of Phoenix, Arizona, on a hillside dotted with cypress trees, a cluster of buildings cuts an otherworldly silhouette out of the desert sky. This is Arcosanti, a working model of sustainable development and the life’s work of Italian architect Paolo Soleri.

Now 90, Soleri has spent the last six decades rethinking the way we build cities.Arcology, his theory of development, integrates architecture, urban planning, and ecology to maximize resources for a bursting world population. The theory calls for compact city centers that expand vertically before growing outward and obviate the need for cars.

Arcosanti is Soleri’s prototype. Its densely concentrated, mixed-use structures use passive-solar design features that create heat from sunlight and cool air from shade and cross ventilation. A small organic farming operation supplies produce for Arcosanti’s cafe. And massive quarter-spherical apses house a bronze foundry and ceramics studio that produces and sells wind-bells to help fund the project. But, the wind-bells don’t pay for everything. Nearly 40 years in the making, Arcosanti is far from complete, due to chronic funding shortfalls. Soleri planned a city that could sustain 5,000 people over a 25-acre area; the residential population actually hovers near 80.

Despite being unfinished, Arcosanti fulfills Soleri’s mission by serving as a laboratory and learning annex, says Matteo di Michele, who coordinates its arcology workshops. More than 50,000 visitors tour the alternative to urban sprawl every year, and thousands of former residents and workshop attendees continue to promote arcology through alumni networks and in professional urban planning and architecture practices. Setting the right example is a fundamental part of the effort. “It’s a question of finding a feasible way to provide a roof for all the seven billion people that are living today,” di Michele says. “So it’s very urgent to build prototypes, to have examples of sustainable, compact cities.”

Photo by Yuki Yanagimoto

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Lester Brown—head of the Earth Policy Institute and, for nearly a half century, sounder of the alarm about the environmental and economic calamities facing humankind—has a plan for saving us from ourselves. It’s a grab bag of core solutions to every challenge you’ve ever heard of—climate change, food insecurity, peak oil. He calls it Plan B (Plan A being our current, unsustainable path).

Brown’s fixes recall Buckminster Fuller: His faith that humanity will respond to grand ambitions causes him to make fantastic prescriptions, like the total replacement of coal-fired power plants with renewables by 2020. Plan B 3.0, the latest edition, requires a “wartime mobilization” comparable to the overhaul of the U.S. economy in the months after our entry into World War II. One component is eliminating poverty, which Brown views as the only way to stabilize the earth’s population at 8 billion and avert a future populated byhungry citizens of failed states. “The number of chronically hungry and malnourished people in the world, which had fallen to 800 million in 2000, has now climbed to a billion and is projected to increase to at least 1.2 billion by 2017,” he notes.

Brown has been right in the past—eventually. In 1995, he wrote a book declaring that China would imperil world food markets by becoming a net importer of food. It didn’t happen in the 12 years Brown predicted, but experts now agree that China is one crop failure away from proving him right. Still, Brown is optimistic about the future. He’s enthusiastic about the nearly vertical growth curve for one of his solutions: installed wind turbines. With luck, he’ll be right about our sustainable future—what remains to be seen is when.

Photo by Rebecca Harms (via Flickr)

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Anonymously situated in a grove of bristlecone pines in the White Mountains of eastern California is a gnarled, ancient specimen of a tree, nicknamed Methuselah, after the Biblical figure of unsurpassed longevity. With an age estimated at more than 4,800 years, Methuselah has outlived all other known organisms on earth. Thanks to recent landmark legislation, backed not only by environmental groups but also by a coalition of outdoor-recreation companies called the Conservation Alliance, the tree will remain unmolested for the foreseeable future.

The Omnibus Public Land Management Act permanently protects as national wilderness more than 2 million acres, including nearly half a million in the Eastern Sierra and White Mountains, where Methuselah resides. “These places are important not just for their inherent habitat or recreational values,” says John Sterling, executive director of the Conservation Alliance. “It’s important to the outdoor business that places like these be protected.”

Founded in 1989 by four leading outdoor-recreation companies—REI, the North Face, Kelty, and Patagonia—the Conservation Alliance now includes more than 160 member companies, whose annual dues are disbursed as grants to the worthiest of wilderness conservation projects throughout North America. The way these companies see it, if the wilderness isn’t protected, there will be no place to use their products. To date, the Alliance has awarded a total of $7.4 million in grants, helping to protect more than 40 million acres of land, preserve access to 17,000 miles of rivers, and stop or remove 27 dams. Typical Alliance-funded projects are local, grassroots efforts that aim to achieve permanent protection of a locale within a four-year period.

Rarely do victories come en masse as they did in late March, when President Obama signed the omnibus bill into law. “With the stroke of a pen,” said Sterling, “Fourteen of the projects we funded crossed the finish line at the same time.”

Photo via the California Wild Heritage Campaign

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