Giving digital tools to ordinary people to help them solve problems.

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…

Leading by example in the field of microfinance.

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…

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…

In the developed world, we’re tethered to our mobile devices. In the developing world, the phones are essentially primary computing devices, as well as communication tools. Mobile phone usage has skyrocketed in recent years in several parts of the world. It begs the question: Is increased connectivity making us more productive? Click here to view the cell phone use infographic.

A collaboration between GOOD and Fogelson-Lubliner.

Using search terms to track emerging influenza pandemics.

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…

A technology that is speeding up the developing world’s internet connections.

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…

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.

A model community that offers a template for sustainable living.

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…

He’s got the plan for how we can share our resources instead of plundering them.

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,…

Outdoor gear companies protect the wilderness where their customers roam.

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…