#health

🇬🇪 Georgia · Green Pole

Volunteers in Tbilisi are hand-building low-cost sensors to fill the gaps in Georgia's threadbare state air-monitoring network, one rooftop at a time.

🇲🇽 Mexico · Un Salto de Vida

The waterfall at El Salto once drew honeymooners; industrial discharge turned it into a wall of chemical foam, and every one of 178 residents tested had heavy metals in their body.

🇸🇱 Sierra Leone · Freetown City Council

The women who sell produce in Freetown's open-air markets stand in direct sun all day and watch their stock rot by afternoon — so the city's heat officer built them roofs.

🇨🇿 Czechia · Arnika

A Prague-based watchdog whose lab testing of toxic chemicals in everyday products has driven Czech and EU-wide policy change.

🇬🇷 Greece · City of Athens

If your flat has no air conditioning and the night never drops below 30°C, the useful thing a city can give you is a cool room to sit in — and Athens counted 35,000 visits.

🇧🇮 Burundi · ADISCO (Appui au Développement Intégral et à la Solidarité sur les Collines)

ADISCO organizes Burundian smallholders into cooperatives and health mutuals so coffee farming builds lasting prosperity, not just export revenue.

🇵🇰 Pakistan · Pakistan Air Quality Initiative (PAQI)

A citizen-scientist network put Pakistan's invisible smog on the map, one low-cost monitor at a time.

🇮🇹 Italy · Cittadini per l'Aria

A Milan-founded network turns ordinary residents into air-quality researchers, then takes City Hall to court over the pollution the data reveals.

🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan · MoveGreen

A youth-founded Kyrgyz NGO turned Bishkek's invisible smog into real-time public data, then built a region-wide coalition to act on it.

🇹🇭 Thailand · Thailand Clean Air Network (Thailand CAN)

A citizen network of scientists and activists drafted Thailand's own Clean Air Act, and in 2025 got it through parliament's lower house without a single vote against.

🇭🇰 Hong Kong · Clean Air Network

Hong Kong's only dedicated air-pollution NGO has spent over 15 years turning smog data into policy wins that let the city breathe easier.

🇧🇬 Bulgaria · Za Zemiata (Environmental Association / Friends of the Earth Bulgaria)

Za Zemiata's research and advocacy helped drive Sofia's low-emission zone, slashing the number of high-polluting cars entering the city center within months of enforcement.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · ClientEarth

Environmental lawyers who take governments and corporations to court — and have helped stop or shut down coal plants across Europe.

🌍 Global · Modern Energy Cooking Services

Around 2.1 billion people still cook over fire, and the usual fix is a slightly better stove — this programme argues the answer is an electric pressure cooker.

🇧🇪 Belgium · NGO Shipbreaking Platform

A European shipowner can sell a worn-out vessel to a cash buyer, watch it be renamed and reflagged mid-voyage, and never legally have sent anything to a beach in South Asia.

🇸🇱 Sierra Leone · Eco-Soap Bank

Discarded hotel soap bars that would otherwise go straight to landfill are sanitized, reprocessed and given to families who can't afford basic hygiene products.

🇳🇬 Nigeria · Health of Mother Earth Foundation

Some Niger Delta villages have not known a fully dark night in sixty years, because the gas flare at the end of the road never goes out.

🇱🇷 Liberia · FACE Africa

A Liberian-founded nonprofit builds wells, latrines and rainwater systems while training women-majority water committees across rural Liberia.

🇬🇹 Guatemala · FUNDAECO

Protects Guatemalan forests while delivering health and education to rural women and communities.

🇭🇹 Haiti · EarthSpark International

A Haiti-focused nonprofit builds solar-powered microgrids that bring 24/7 metered electricity — and a feminist approach to energy access — to rural towns cut off from the national grid.

🇧🇩 Bangladesh · Dhaka North City Corporation

Dhaka North appointed Asia's first chief heat officer for a city of fifteen million where the people most exposed to heat are the ones living under corrugated metal.

🌍 Global · Pure Earth

A backyard where car batteries are melted down looks like nothing at all — which is why roughly a billion children carry lead in their blood and almost nobody is looking for the source.

🇿🇦 South Africa · FoodForward SA

South Africa's largest food redistribution network rescues surplus food from farms and retailers and turns it into millions of meals for people going hungry.

🇷🇼 Rwanda · Gardens for Health International

In Rwanda's health centers, families identified as malnourished are trained to grow their own vegetables instead of waiting on food aid.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Gift of the Givers Foundation

Founded by Imtiaz Sooliman in 1992, South Africa's largest disaster-relief NGO drills boreholes, runs desalination plants, and trucks millions of litres of water to communities in crisis across Africa and beyond.

🇺🇸 United States · GirlTrek

A grassroots health movement that has mobilized more than a million Black women across the US to walk daily for their physical, mental and community health.

🇮🇳 India · Care for Air

A volunteer-driven Delhi non-profit that turned parental worry over toxic winters into a Supreme Court petition and a citywide clean-air education movement.

🌍 Global · Grassroot Soccer

Grassroot Soccer turns soccer practice into a curriculum for HIV prevention, mental health and reproductive health education for adolescents across the developing world.

🇸🇿 Eswatini · Guba

Guba teaches Swazi families to turn small homesteads into thriving, chemical-free food gardens that boost nutrition and income.

🇨🇴 Colombia · Cuerpo Colegiado de Guardianes del Río Atrato (Comisión de Guardianes del Río Atrato)

Fourteen community-elected guardians from the Chocó rainforest co-represent the Atrato River's legal rights after mercury from illegal mining poisoned it.

🇬🇹 Guatemala · HELPS International

A Texas-based nonprofit whose Guatemalan-manufactured ONIL stove has cut deadly indoor smoke for hundreds of thousands of Mayan households.

🇦🇹 Austria · HEMAYAT - Betreuungszentrum für Folter- und Kriegsüberlebende

Since 1995, Hemayat has offered free interpreter-supported psychotherapy in Vienna to survivors of torture and war, one of the few services of its kind in Austria.

🇦🇺 Australia · Indigenous Marathon Foundation

Every year, twelve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander runners train for six months to complete the New York City Marathon, then return home as certified community health leaders.

🇰🇮 Kiribati · Kiribati Family Health Association (KFHA)

Kiribati's leading sexual and reproductive health charity keeps family planning, HIV testing, and counselling running from Tarawa's clinics to the outer islands.

🇲🇽 Mexico · World Resources Institute

Heat is not evenly distributed across a city — one block can be ten degrees hotter than another — and until recently nobody could show a mayor exactly which block.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Hutukara Associação Yanomami

Illegal gold miners use mercury to bind the gold, the rivers carry it into the fish, and the Yanomami eat the fish — so the association measured its own people's hair to prove it.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Ndlovu Care Group

A Dutch doctor's rural clinic in Limpopo grew into a healthcare, education, and community-development group whose youth choir went on to captivate audiences on America's Got Talent.

🇹🇭 Thailand · EnLAWTHAI Foundation

A lead processing plant flushed its waste into the creek a Karen village drank from, and every one of the village's 221 residents was poisoned. Winning took nineteen years.

🇦🇺 Australia · Sweltering Cities

Australian rentals must have a working smoke alarm but not a bearable temperature, so a home can legally hit 40°C inside and the tenant has no recourse.

🇺🇬 Uganda · SPOUTS International

A Kampala social enterprise fires clay into ceramic filters so Ugandan households can stop boiling water over smoky charcoal fires.

🇧🇹 Bhutan · Bhutan Foundation

The Bhutan Foundation works with yak-herding communities in the high Jomolhari region to protect one of the world's most secretive big cats while easing the human-wildlife conflict that threatens both people and predators.

🇨🇲 Cameroon · Renewable Energy Innovators Cameroon (REI-Cameroon)

Solar minigrids are bringing round-the-clock power to off-grid Cameroonian villages that the national electricity grid has never reached.

🇳🇵 Nepal · SunFarmer

A nonprofit solar finance organization installs solar power for hospitals, clinics, schools, and farms across rural Nepal, replacing unreliable grid power and diesel.

🌍 Global · We Care Solar

A Berkeley nonprofit equips last-mile health clinics with rugged 'Solar Suitcase' kits, giving midwives reliable light and power to safely deliver babies after dark.

🇵🇭 Philippines · EcoWaste Coalition

Grown out of the campaign that won the Philippines' Clean Air Act, this coalition now battles the backyard trash fires that keep filling Filipino neighborhoods with toxic smoke.

🇵🇭 Philippines · BAN Toxics

Small-scale gold miners handle mercury because it works and they were never shown anything else — so the argument that changed minds was not health, it was that gravity methods recover more gold.

🇵🇪 Peru · Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense

For decades the smelter at La Oroya put so much lead, arsenic and sulphur dioxide into the air that children's blood tested above safe limits almost universally — and in 2024 an international court finally said the state was responsible.

🇨🇳 China · Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE)

A Beijing NGO turned government smokestack data into a public app that lets millions of citizens see who's polluting their air.

🇿🇦 South Africa · The Chaeli Campaign

Founded by a nine-year-old wheelchair user who asked her community to fund one, the Chaeli Campaign now runs inclusive early-childhood, arts, and advocacy programmes for thousands of South African children with disabilities.

🇳🇵 Nepal · The Cookstove Project

A small US nonprofit building smokeless brick-and-steel cookstoves with rural Nepali families to replace smoky open fires.

🇮🇳 India · Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation

A 2010 heatwave killed more than a thousand people in Ahmedabad in a week. The plan the city wrote afterwards now saves roughly that many lives every year.

🇧🇩 Bangladesh · Young Power in Social Action

Dead ships are run at full speed onto the beach at Chattogram and cut up where they lie, by men with blowtorches standing in asbestos and oil residue.

🇮🇹 Italy · Genitori Tarantini

In the Tamburi district of Taranto, families were told to keep children indoors on windy days, because the wind carries iron dust off the slag heaps of the steelworks next door.

🇿🇲 Zambia · Environment Africa

The mine at Kabwe closed in 1994 and was never cleaned up, so children play on tailings and more than nine in ten of them have lead in their blood.

🇺🇸 United States · Alaska Institute for Justice

Thawing permafrost, vanished sea ice and storms with nothing to break them are taking Alaska Native villages house by house — and no US agency has the job of relocating a community.

🇨🇱 Chile · Mujeres de Zonas de Sacrificio en Resistencia Quintero-Puchuncaví

Chile zoned this bay for the industry nobody wanted anywhere else, then acted surprised when schoolchildren started collapsing — so the mothers took the phrase 'sacrifice zone' and made it the state's problem.

🇪🇸 Spain · Ayuntamiento de Sevilla

Hurricanes get names and people take them seriously. Heat kills more Europeans and arrives anonymously — so Seville started naming it.

🇲🇼 Malawi · Theatre for a Change

Interactive drama is helping Malawian teachers and girls take control of their sexual and reproductive health in a country where a third of girls are pregnant by 18.

🇧🇦 Bosnia and Herzegovina · Eko akcija

Eko akcija runs Bosnia and Herzegovina's citizen air-quality monitoring network and pushes Sarajevo's government to tackle the wood-and-coal smog that chokes the city each winter.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Ubuntu Pathways

One integrated campus in Zwide township delivers healthcare, schooling, and family support to 2,000 vulnerable children so poverty stops with their generation.

🇮🇳 India · Warrior Moms

Five worried Delhi mothers turned lockdown blue skies into a pan-India movement demanding clean air for every child.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · Cool Roofs Indonesia

The cheapest air conditioner is a tin of highly reflective paint on the roof, and an Indonesian university team proved it could drop indoor temperatures by ten degrees.

🇿🇦 South Africa · groundWork Friends of the Earth South Africa

groundWork's #DeadlyAir lawsuit forced South Africa's courts to declare toxic Mpumalanga Highveld air a violation of the constitutional right to a healthy environment.

🇦🇹 Austria · neunerhaus

neunerhaus gives Vienna's homeless a home first, then the healthcare, jobs training and vet care for their pets that make staying housed possible.