#livelihoods

🇳🇵 Nepal · Empowering Women of Nepal (EWN)

Three sisters in Pokhara built a free training pipeline that has turned nearly 2,000 disadvantaged Nepali women into trekking guides in a profession once reserved for men.

🇸🇿 Eswatini · All Out Africa Foundation

From a research camp on the Mbuluzi River, this Eswatini-registered nonprofit has spent over a decade training Swati scientists and monitoring the country's savanna wildlife while feeding thousands of vulnerable children.

🇦🇴 Angola · ACADIR (Associação de Conservação do Ambiente e Desenvolvimento Integrado Rural)

Angola's first locally-led conservation NGO helps communities in Cuando Cubango secure land and resource rights while rebuilding farms, fisheries and wildlife after decades of war.

🇸🇻 El Salvador · Asociación Mangle

A grassroots community group is hand-dredging clogged mangrove channels to bring fish, shrimp and floodwater relief back to El Salvador's Jiquilisco Bay.

🇦🇷 Argentina · Fundación Banco de Bosques

A lean Argentine foundation lets anyone "buy" a square meter of native forest online, and used the crowd-funded model to help create a 128,000-hectare national park.

🇦🇹 Austria · Biosphärenpark Nockberge

Since Austria's first national park here gave way to a UNESCO biosphere reserve, the Carinthian Nockberge have shown that centuries-old alpine farming and rare grassland biodiversity can thrive side by side.

🇧🇷 Brazil · MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra)

Latin America's largest social movement, born from land occupations in the 1980s, has helped hundreds of thousands of landless rural families win legal title to farmland through Brazil's agrarian reform program.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Bridges for Music

A purpose-built academy in Cape Town's oldest township, Langa, trains young creatives in electronic music production, DJing, and the business skills to turn beats into livelihoods.

🇦🇫 Afghanistan · DACAAR (Danish Committee for Aid to Afghan Refugees)

Afghanistan's largest WASH NGO drills wells, monitors groundwater and rebuilds water networks across all 34 provinces, even as aid budgets shrink.

🇺🇿 Uzbekistan · Saiga Conservation Alliance

Since 2004 a researcher-led alliance has worked with schools, ex-hunters and rangers on Uzbekistan's Ustyurt plateau and the dried Aral seabed to pull the critically endangered saiga antelope back from the brink.

🇮🇳 India · Gorakhpur Environmental Action Group (GEAG)

In flood-prone Gorakhpur, women farmers are turning the city's peri-urban wetlands and fields into working flood buffers that also feed their families.

🇧🇮 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.

🇬🇩 Grenada · Cocoa Farming Future Initiative (CFFI)

After two hurricanes wiped out Grenada's cocoa farms, a farmer-founded nonprofit began regrafting and replanting organic cocoa trees to rebuild growers' incomes and the island's signature crop.

🇧🇧 Barbados · Coral Reef Restoration Alliance (CORALL)

A volunteer-run alliance of Barbadian divers, fishers and residents grows coral fragments in nurseries and transplants them onto the island's degraded west coast reefs.

🇫🇯 Fiji · Live & Learn Fiji

From mangrove replanting to cyclone-ready water systems, rural Fijian villages are building their own climate defences with Indigenous knowledge at the core.

🇧🇧 Barbados · CloudSolar

Barbadians can buy a share of a solar panel online and earn credits as it feeds clean power into the island's grid, opening solar investment to households who can't install rooftop systems themselves.

🇻🇳 Vietnam · Centre for Marinelife Conservation and Community Development (MCD)

Along Vietnam's storm-battered coast, fishing and farming communities are pairing mangrove restoration with climate-adaptive livelihoods to ride out the next typhoon.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · Mwambao Coastal Community Network

A Zanzibar-born network puts coastal Tanzanian communities in charge of restoring reefs, mangroves and fisheries on which their livelihoods depend.

🇳🇵 Nepal · Practical Action

Community-run gauge readers and telephone chains now give flood-prone Nepali villages hours of extra warning before rivers burst their banks.

🇹🇯 Tajikistan · Association of Nature Conservation Organizations of Tajikistan (ANCOT)

A Dushanbe-based conservation network unites family- and community-run conservancies across Tajikistan's mountains, turning former poachers into rangers protecting markhor, urial and snow leopard.

🇱🇦 Laos · Association Anoulak

A French-registered, Laos-based conservation team led community rangers on anti-poaching patrols and biodiversity surveys in the Annamite Mountains' last saola stronghold.

🇲🇲 Myanmar · Friends of Wildlife (FOW)

A Yangon-based NGO works with villagers across Myanmar to protect elephants, Eld's deer and freshwater fish through community-run conservation zones and cleaner cookstoves.

🇵🇭 Philippines · Green Empowerment

A Portland-based nonprofit partners with grassroots engineers to build community-owned micro-hydro systems that bring reliable, affordable electricity to Indigenous villages in the Philippine highlands.

🇨🇴 Colombia · Conceptos Plásticos

A Bogotá social enterprise melts down plastic waste into Lego-like bricks that assemble into low-cost, durable classrooms and homes.

🇦🇿 Azerbaijan · Birding Azerbaijan

Volunteer counters stake out a narrow strip of Caspian coastline every autumn to log one of the largest bird migrations on Earth passing through Azerbaijan.

🇭🇷 Croatia · Zelena energetska zadruga (ZEZ / Green Energy Cooperative)

ZEZ turns Croatian rooftops into citizen-owned power plants, letting neighbors crowd-invest in solar panels and keep the clean-energy profits in their own towns.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Duzi-uMngeni Conservation Trust (DUCT)

Since 2005, DUCT has been watchdog and rehab crew for the uMsunduzi and uMngeni Rivers, pairing water-quality monitoring with jobs for the communities living along their banks.

🇦🇹 Austria · Die Tafel Österreich

Founded as the Wiener Tafel in 1999, this volunteer-run network now rescues up to four tons of surplus food a day for people in need across every Austrian province.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Dyer Island Conservation Trust

Off Gansbaai's shark-rich waters, researchers tag great whites while rehabbers hand-raise stranded African penguin chicks for a colony fighting collapse.

🌍 Global · Eden: People+Planet (formerly Eden Reforestation Projects)

A nonprofit that fights extreme poverty by hiring local villagers to restore forests in the developing world.

🇫🇷 France · Emmaüs International

Founded by Abbé Pierre in 1949 to house Paris's homeless, this movement now runs hundreds of self-funding solidarity communities on four continents.

🇮🇪 Ireland · Fair Seas

A coalition of Ireland's leading ocean NGOs is pushing to grow Irish marine protection from under 10% to 30% by 2030.

🌍 Global · Farm Radio International

A Canadian charity supplies African community radio stations with scripts, tools and training that turn broadcasts into two-way conversations with farmers.

🇧🇼 Botswana · Ecoexist Trust

Ecoexist Trust helps Okavango farmers protect their harvests and livelihoods so both people and Botswana's elephants can thrive side by side.

🇭🇹 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.

🇬🇦 Gabon · Space for Giants

Mobile electric fences are letting Gabonese farmers protect their crops from Africa's largest population of critically endangered forest elephants without conflict.

🇱🇻 Latvia · Latvijas Samariešu apvienība (Samaritan Association of Latvia)

A Riga-based food bank turns unsold groceries from Latvian retailers into parcels for families, pensioners and disabled people who don't qualify for state aid.

🇿🇦 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.

🇱🇷 Liberia · Champions for Nature Conservation Liberia (CNCL)

A Monrovia-based NGO pays residents by the kilogram to sort and hand over plastic waste before it clogs the wetlands that feed the city.

🇲🇽 Mexico · Grupo de Ecología y Conservación de Islas, A.C. (GECI)

A Baja California NGO clears rats, cats and goats off Mexico's islands, and formerly extinct seabird colonies are returning by the thousands.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Kenya Red Cross Society

Instead of waiting for a drought to become a crisis, Kenya Red Cross now releases cash, seeds and water repairs the moment forecasts turn ugly.

🇪🇸 Spain · Fundació Espigoladors

A Catalan gleaning network rescues 'ugly' fruit and vegetables that farms would otherwise discard, turning them into meals and jobs.

🇰🇪 Kenya · GROOTS Kenya

A national movement of grassroots, women-led community groups training Kenyan women to map, register and defend their names on land titles in a country where only 3% of women hold a title deed solely in their own name.

🇲🇪 Montenegro · NGO Green Home

A Montenegrin NGO that organized local fishermen to help design the country's second marine protected area, then kept the government's dam plans off two of its wildest rivers.

🇸🇮 Slovenia · Focus Association for Sustainable Development (Focus, društvo za sonaraven razvoj)

Focus helped the former coal town of Hrastnik build Slovenia's first cooperative rooftop-solar community, turning ordinary households and shops into an energy-self-sufficient neighborhood.

🇳🇬 Nigeria · Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF)

Nigeria's oldest conservation NGO is restoring degraded forest around the Omo Forest Reserve while paying local communities to grow the trees.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Grootbos Foundation

Grootbos leads a roughly 50-landowner conservancy protecting over 1,500 fynbos species in the Cape Floral Kingdom while training unemployed young people for green jobs.

🇧🇮 Burundi · Association Burundaise pour la Protection de la Nature (ABN)

Burundi's national BirdLife partner mobilizes highland farming communities to replant the river catchments that keep Lake Tanganyika from silting and salting up.

🇲🇩 Moldova · Moldova Organic Value Chain Alliance (MOVCA)

Moldova's first and largest organic-farming alliance is helping vintners and smallholders convert prized cernozem soil to certified organic production.

🇱🇸 Lesotho · Growing Nations

A Basotho-run NGO teaches mountain farmers 'likoti' planting-basin conservation agriculture that is reviving eroded soils and multiplying maize harvests across Lesotho's highlands.

🇹🇹 Trinidad and Tobago · Nature Seekers

A village conservation group founded in 1990 turned Matura Beach from a poaching hotspot into a stronghold protecting half of Trinidad's nesting leatherback turtles.

🇻🇪 Venezuela · Provita (Asociacion Civil Provita)

Venezuela's oldest conservation NGO protects one of the country's most important hawksbill turtle nesting beaches, turning former egg poachers into nest guardians in the remote fishing village of Macuro.

🇿🇼 Zimbabwe · Painted Dog Conservation

Anti-poaching rangers, a rehabilitation centre and a bush camp for local kids are keeping Zimbabwe's endangered painted dogs alive.

🇭🇹 Haiti · Fonkoze

Fonkoze -- Haitian Creole for 'Shoulder-to-Shoulder Foundation' -- built the country's largest microfinance network to reach rural women that banks never bothered to serve.

🇵🇭 Philippines · Haribon Foundation

The Philippines' oldest conservation group replants degraded watersheds with native, fruit-bearing trees instead of fast-growing exotics, rebuilding both forests and rural livelihoods.

🇨🇿 Czechia · Hnutí DUHA (Friends of the Earth Czech Republic)

A Czech environmental NGO turned energy customers into energy owners, switching on the country's first true citizen-owned solar power plant.

🇨🇦 Canada · Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated

Nunavut Tunngavik represents 30,000 Inuit as the legal steward of the largest Indigenous land claim settlement in Canadian history.

🇸🇪 Sweden · Karma

A Stockholm-founded app lets restaurants and shops sell unsold food at a discount instead of throwing it away, saving millions of meals.

🇮🇳 India · Kheyti

Kheyti's 'Greenhouse-in-a-Box' gives Indian smallholders an affordable, low-water greenhouse that multiplies yields and incomes.

🇦🇴 Angola · Fundação Kissama

A Luanda-based conservation foundation and university biologists have turned former turtle hunters into nest guardians along Angola's coast.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Red Rocket South Africa (Pty) Ltd

Two run-of-river turbines on the Ash River generate enough renewable power for nearly 2,000 Free State households, with a share of revenue funding local jobs, a gym and a children's daycare.

🇨🇬 Republic of the Congo · The Aspinall Foundation

Orphaned gorillas raised by The Aspinall Foundation are rewilded into the Republic of Congo's 173,000-hectare Lésio-Louna Reserve, once emptied by hunting.

🌍 Global · M-KOPA

Pay-as-you-go fintech providing solar power, smartphones and e-motorbikes on affordable credit to underbanked Africans.

🇹🇴 Tonga · MORDI Tonga Trust

In Tonga's villages, MORDI Tonga turns community-written development plans into seed banks, cyclone-ready infrastructure, and new income for rural families.

🇲🇱 Mali · Mali Elephant Landscapes (WILD Foundation)

An all-Malian field team protects the world's last desert-adapted elephants and their 1,000km migration route by putting local communities in charge of natural resource rules.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN)

Indonesia's largest Indigenous alliance is racing to map millions of hectares of ancestral forest before loggers and plantations get there first.

🇬🇲 Gambia · Maruo Farms

A Gambian rice company organizes thousands of smallholders, 90% of them women, into a climate-resilient local rice supply chain.

🇫🇲 Micronesia · Micronesia Conservation Trust (MCT)

The regional trust fund bankrolling the Micronesia Challenge, moving over $100 million to protect coral reefs and forests across five Pacific nations and territories.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Association for Coastal Ecosystem Services (ACES)

The world's first blue carbon project pays a Kenyan fishing community to protect and replant the mangroves of Gazi Bay.

🇹🇬 Togo · Mivo Énergie

A Togolese social enterprise sells solar lamps and clean cookstoves on flexible credit so families can quit costly, smoky kerosene and charcoal.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Monkeybiz

A Cape Town bead cooperative pays township women immediately, in cash, for hand-beaded art now sold everywhere from the V&A Waterfront to international folk art markets.

🇲🇻 Maldives · Maldives Whale Shark Research Programme

A Maldivian charity that photo-identifies individual whale sharks by their spot patterns to protect the only year-round aggregation site of its kind on Earth.

🇦🇲 Armenia · Armenia Tree Project

Since 1994, this Yerevan-rooted nonprofit has replanted the trees Armenian families were forced to cut for firewood during a post-Soviet energy crisis.

🇬🇳 Guinea · Guinée Écologie

Guinea's oldest environmental NGO is running village nurseries to regrow the degraded classified forest of Mont Béro, tree by native tree.

🇬🇦 Gabon · Organisation Ecologique des Lacs et de l'Ogooué (OELO)

Residents of a fishing village on Lake Oguemoué formed their own NGO to police bushmeat and overfishing, turning ecotourism income into wetland protection across Gabon's largest Ramsar site.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Ocean Sole

A Nairobi social enterprise carves discarded beach flip-flops into vivid sculptures, turning marine debris into income for local artisans.

🇰🇪 Kenya · One Acre Fund

Nonprofit supplying East and Southern African smallholder farmers with seed, fertilizer, training and credit to boost harvests.

🇦🇺 Australia · OzHarvest

Australia's leading food rescue charity collects surplus food that would otherwise go to landfill and delivers it straight to people who need it.

🇳🇮 Nicaragua · Paso Pacifico

Former egg poachers turned community rangers now patrol Nicaragua's Pacific beaches every night to save critically endangered sea turtles.

🇩🇴 Dominican Republic · Plant With Purpose

Dominican farm families are replanting degraded mountain watersheds with cacao, avocado, and mango trees, cutting poverty while rebuilding the forest canopy.

🌍 Global · Plastic Bank

Turning ocean-bound plastic into currency for the world's most vulnerable coastal communities.

🇺🇦 Ukraine · Ecoaction (Center for Environmental Initiatives)

Ukraine's largest environmental NGO is steering coal-mining regions toward a fossil-free 'just transition' and pushing green standards into the country's war reconstruction, even as Russian attacks continue.

🇵🇰 Pakistan · Snow Leopard Foundation Pakistan (SLF)

A Pakistan-founded NGO builds predator-proof livestock corrals and community insurance schemes across Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral so herders stop losing snow leopards to retaliatory killing.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Fundação Pró-TAMAR

A national network of beach stations that turned Brazil's five sea turtle species from bycatch statistics into a 40-million-strong conservation success story.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · PT Rimba Makmur Utama (Katingan Mentaya Project)

The Katingan Mentaya Project protects and rewets one of the world's largest tracts of tropical peat swamp forest in Borneo, keeping centuries of stored carbon out of the atmosphere.

🇸🇱 Sierra Leone · Namati

Community paralegals trained by Namati are helping Sierra Leonean villages fight exploitative land leases and win back territory signed away without their consent.

🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan · CAMP Alatoo

A Kyrgyz NGO helps woodland communities in southern Kyrgyzstan sustainably manage the planet's largest naturally growing walnut forest instead of losing it to overgrazing and degradation.

🇦🇹 Austria · Re-Use Austria

A national umbrella group of Austrian repair cafes and reuse shops is proving that fixing things instead of binning them can create real jobs, not just save the planet.

🇰🇭 Cambodia · Marine Conservation Cambodia

From a small island base in the Kep Archipelago, this community-rooted NGO has spent nearly two decades turning trawled-out seabeds back into thriving fishing grounds.

🇧🇴 Bolivia · Fundación Natura Bolivia

Bolivian farmers protect the forests that feed their taps, paid in beehives and fruit trees instead of cash.

🇨🇮 Ivory Coast · AGRO-MAP

An Ivorian nature-based-solutions company is planting millions of trees with cocoa farmers to claw back forest lost to decades of cocoa expansion.

🇬🇲 Gambia · Sankandi Youth Development Association (SYDA)

A rural youth association is replanting the mangrove green belt along the Bintang Bolong to bring back fish, farmland and firewood for six Gambian communities.

🇯🇲 Jamaica · Southern Trelawny Environmental Agency (STEA)

A community-rooted Trelawny NGO is replanting native forest in Jamaica's Cockpit Country, the karst wilderness that supplies 40 percent of the island's freshwater.

🇲🇬 Madagascar · Green Again Madagascar

A Malagasy-run replanting crew regrows native rainforest canopy, tree by GPS-tagged tree, to rebuild lemur habitat scorched by fire on Madagascar's east coast.

🇱🇹 Lithuania · Maisto bankas (Lithuanian Food Bank)

Lithuania's largest food bank collects unsold, edible food from retailers and farmers and turns it into meals for people who need it.

🇬🇪 Georgia · CENN (Caucasus Environmental NGO Network)

A Tbilisi-based NGO wrote Georgia's first National Forest Policy and now helps mountain villages manage their forests sustainably instead of stripping them for firewood.

🇸🇰 Slovakia · People and Water (Ľudia a voda)

A Slovak NGO's low-cost check dams, ponds and swales rewet drought-cracked farmland, restoring the landscape's natural water cycle one village at a time.

🇮🇶 Iraq · Nature Iraq

Iraq's first conservation NGO fights to keep the Garden of Eden's marshes alive as upstream dams and drought squeeze the water that sustains the Marsh Arabs.

🇵🇪 Peru · Instituto de Montaña (The Mountain Institute Peru)

As tropical glaciers retreat, Andean communities are digging out 1,000-year-old canals and reservoirs to keep water flowing through the dry season.

🇱🇧 Lebanon · Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon (SPNL)

Lebanon's oldest environmental NGO revives the ancient Hima system of community stewardship to protect the country's rivers, wetlands and water-scarce highlands.

🇸🇾 Syria · Syria Forest Foundation

A Washington-founded diaspora nonprofit is rebuilding Syria's war-battered olive and pistachio orchards, one nursery and farmer cooperative at a time.

🇩🇿 Algeria · Association pour la Protection de l'Environnement de Béni-Isguen (APEB)

In a Saharan oasis founded on ancestral water and palm-grove wisdom, a local association is training a new generation in agroecology and composting.

🌍 Global · Rikolto

Rikolto partners with farmer cooperatives on four continents to build fairer, more sustainable food value chains from rice to cocoa to coffee.

🇺🇬 Uganda · Ripple Effect

Ripple Effect (formerly Send a Cow) has trained East African smallholder families since 1988 to farm sustainably, restore degraded land and build lasting food security.

🇫🇯 Fiji · Rise Beyond the Reef

Connects women in remote Fijian villages to markets for their traditional crafts, lifting incomes and resilience.

🇮🇳 India · SELCO Foundation

SELCO Foundation designs solar-powered solutions for low-income Indian households, clinics, and small businesses to improve livelihoods.

🇧🇩 Bangladesh · SOLshare

SOLshare wires neighboring solar home systems into smart micro-grids so households can sell their spare sunshine to the family next door over mobile money.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust (Eigg Electric)

Since 2008, the roughly 100 residents of Scotland's Isle of Eigg have collectively owned and run the world's first off-grid community electricity network powered by hydro, wind, and solar.

🌍 Global · RECOFTC - The Center for People and Forests

Since 1987, RECOFTC has helped forest communities across the Asia-Pacific win legal tenure and management rights over the forests they depend on, growing community forestry from almost nothing to a quarter of the region's forests.

🇧🇹 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.

🇱🇰 Sri Lanka · Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society (SLWCS)

For three decades a Sri Lanka-based research team has been building electric fences, buses and beehives to keep both farmers and wild elephants safe in the Wasgamuwa region.

🇦🇹 Austria · Sindbad - Social Business

Sindbad pairs socioeconomically disadvantaged Austrian teenagers with trained young-adult mentors for up to a year to help them cross the finish line into an apprenticeship or further schooling.

🌍 Global · Slow Food

Founded in Italy to fight fast food's spread, this grassroots network now defends local farmers, biodiversity and food traditions in 160 countries.

🇮🇳 India · Husk Power Systems

The world's largest operator of community solar mini-grids delivers round-the-clock renewable power to rural villages and small businesses across India and Nigeria that the national grid has never reached.

🇳🇬 Nigeria · PowerGen Renewable Energy

A Kenya-headquartered mini-grid developer builds and operates solar-powered mini-grids that bring first-time electricity access to rural Nigerian households and businesses.

🇨🇲 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.

🇲🇷 Mauritania · Gret

Gret's multifunctional solar platforms bring electricity, mills and clean water to Mauritanian villages too remote or small for the national grid.

🌍 Global · Solar Sister

A women-led network of clean-energy entrepreneurs bringing solar lights and clean cookstoves to off-grid Africa.

🇩🇯 Djibouti · Impact Water Solutions

A solar-powered, battery-free desalination unit on Lake Ghoubet delivers free drinking water to a Djiboutian community that had none.

🇰🇪 Kenya · SunCulture

A Kenyan climate-tech company sells pay-as-you-go solar irrigation pumps that let smallholder farmers grow food year-round without diesel fuel or grid power.

🇱🇨 Saint Lucia · Soufrière Marine Management Association (SMMA)

Since 1994 fishers, dive operators and the government have jointly managed Saint Lucia's most valuable reef through a single, zoned marine protected area.

🇺🇸 United States · Soul Fire Farm

On 80 acres in upstate New York, a Black- and Indigenous-led farm is training a new generation of farmers of color while feeding families locked out of the food system.

🇰🇳 Saint Kitts and Nevis · St. Kitts Consortium of Farmers & Food Producers (SKCFFP)

A grassroots network is mobilizing St. Kitts and Nevis's crop farmers, livestock keepers and agro-processors to cut the country's reliance on imported food.

🇿🇲 Zambia · Emerging Cooking Solutions

Zambian households rent internet-connected stoves and buy waste-wood pellets instead of charcoal, cutting cooking costs and pressure on the country's shrinking woodlands.

🌍 Global · TIST

Farmer-led small-group network across East Africa and India that plants trees for carbon income and land restoration.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · TRAID

A London charity collects unwanted clothes from over 700 clothing banks and free home pickups, reselling and recycling them to keep fashion out of landfill.

🇬🇾 Guyana · Caiman House

An Indigenous-owned research station in the Rupununi runs one of only two black caiman research projects on Earth, funding a village library with every visitor.

🇧🇪 Belgium · Community Land Trust Brussels (CLTB)

Continental Europe's first community land trust keeps land permanently out of the speculative market so low-income Brussels families can buy homes at up to half the price of the private market.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Transfrontier Africa NPC

South Africa's Black Mambas patrol Greater Kruger unarmed, using visible presence and community roots to push rhino poaching toward zero.

🇿🇦 South Africa · The Litterboom Project NPC

Since 2017, floating booms across KwaZulu-Natal and Western Cape rivers have intercepted more than 2.5 million kilograms of plastic before it reaches the sea.

🇩🇰 Denmark · Middelgrunden Wind Turbine Cooperative

Thousands of ordinary Danes pooled savings to co-own half of a 40 MW offshore wind farm just outside Copenhagen, still one of the world's largest cooperatively owned wind projects.

🇵🇪 Peru · Rainforest Foundation US

A legal title is often the only thing standing between an Indigenous Amazon community and the bulldozers, so this program puts mapping tools and titling paperwork directly in communities' hands.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · Ujamaa Community Resource Team (UCRT)

UCRT helps Maasai, Hadzabe, Datoga and other pastoralist and hunter-gatherer communities in northern Tanzania win legally binding titles to the rangeland their livelihoods depend on.

🇳🇺 Niue · Tofia Niue

A tiny raised-coral nation partnered with its own community NGO to put its entire ocean territory under protection.

🇲🇽 Mexico · Union de Cooperativas Tosepan

Tens of thousands of Nahua and Totonac families in Mexico's Sierra Norte de Puebla run their own cooperative economy, organic coffee, community finance, housing and forests, outside the reach of intermediaries.

🇸🇳 Senegal · Tostan

Empowers rural West African communities through education programs that have led thousands of villages to abandon harmful practices.

🇬🇭 Ghana · Toyola Energy Limited

A Ghanaian social enterprise sells ceramic-lined charcoal stoves that cut smoke, fuel bills, and burns for low-income households across West Africa.

🇬🇪 Georgia · NACRES – Centre for Biodiversity Conservation & Research

Georgia's oldest biodiversity NGO runs camera traps across the Caucasus mountains that caught the country's first confirmed leopard sighting in over a decade, and works with herders to keep predators and livestock apart.

🇧🇼 Botswana · Cheetah Conservation Botswana

Trains local Tswana livestock guarding dogs so Kalahari farmers and Botswana's 1,700 wild cheetahs can share the same unfenced land.

🇵🇪 Peru · ProDelphinus

A Lima-based marine biology NGO teaches Peru's small-scale fishers to safely release sea turtles caught in their nets and lines, turning bycatch victims into survivors.

🇳🇪 Niger · Sahara Sahel Foods

Sahara Sahel Foods pays rural Nigerien women to harvest native trees and shrubs, turning stigmatized wild foods into a growing regional market.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Ubuntu Football

A six-year football-and-academics programme turns talented boys from Cape Town's townships into university graduates and professional players.

🇪🇬 Egypt · VeryNile

Egypt's grassroots initiative paying Nile fishermen fair wages to fish plastic instead of dwindling catch.

🇰🇲 Comoros · Association pour le Développement Socio-Économique d'Itsamia (ADSEI)

A village association on Mohéli turned a beach once fouled by poached turtle carcasses into one of the Southwest Indian Ocean's best-protected green turtle nesting sites.

🇰🇪 Kenya · WEEE Centre

East Africa's licensed e-waste recycler dismantles old phones, computers and appliances in Nairobi so toxic components never reach landfill or open dumps.

🇼🇸 Samoa · Women in Business Development Incorporated (WIBDI)

Since 1991, Samoan village women have turned certified-organic coconut oil and hand-woven fine mats into a global supply chain.

🇳🇬 Nigeria · Wecyclers

Cargo-bike collectors reward Lagos households with points and prizes for their recyclable waste.

🇹🇱 Timor-Leste · WithOneSeed

Subsistence farmers in Timor-Leste's Baguia district are replanting deforested hillsides and getting paid in carbon income for every tree they nurture.

🇿🇲 Zambia · Conservation South Luangwa

A Zambian-led NGO fields community scouts, a K9 anti-poaching unit and vets to protect 1.4 million hectares of the Luangwa Valley.

🇦🇹 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.

🇦🇹 Austria · Verein Ökoregion Kaindorf

A grassroots Styrian association built one of Europe's first voluntary carbon-certificate markets that pays farmers directly for every tonne of CO2 they lock back into their soil.