#livelihoods

🇸🇬 Singapore · Food from the Heart

Every day of the year, volunteer Bread Runners in Singapore collect bakery and hotel leftovers and deliver them to welfare homes, moving 199,000 kg in 2025.

🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia · Saudi Food Bank (Etaam)

Founded in Dammam in 2012 as the first food bank in the Gulf, Etaam runs refrigerated trucks and production lines that turned 245,972 fresh meals from waste into food for 9,118 families.

🇳🇵 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.

🇭🇺 Hungary · Magyar Élelmiszerbank Egyesület

Started by 13 friends, the Hungarian Food Bank now collects from about 800 stores and manufacturers every day, and even rescues roughly 350,000 untouched school lunches each school year.

🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates · UAE Food Bank

Launched in 2017 under Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives, the UAE Food Bank diverted 6,275 tonnes of surplus food from landfill in 2025, the equivalent of over 15 million meals.

🇵🇭 Philippines · Project Seahorse

Seahorse photos uploaded by ordinary divers revealed a Philippine hot spot, and local communities answered by creating a new marine protected area.

🇳🇴 Norway · International Centre for Reindeer Husbandry

Rain falling on snow freezes into a lid the reindeer cannot dig through, and a herder can lose a season's animals to one warm afternoon in January.

🇯🇵 Japan · TERA Energy

Customers of a power retailer founded by Buddhist priests in 2018 pay nothing extra, yet up to 2.5% of every bill goes to a local group they choose, and a 100% renewable plan is on offer.

🇲🇿 Mozambique · ParCo (Associação dos Parceiros Comunitários)

In Mangalisse village dried seahorses were once called diamonds and children skipped school to catch them; now the same fishers take tourists out on dhows to snorkel with them.

🇲🇽 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.

🇲🇰 North Macedonia · Донирај компјутер (Donate a Computer)

What began in 2016 as one programmer repairing old PCs in Kavadarci has grown into a volunteer network that hands refurbished computers to families who cannot afford one.

🇵🇷 Puerto Rico · Casa Pueblo

After Hurricane Maria, an Adjuntas community group made its solar-powered building an 'energy oasis' for dialysis machines and medicine fridges, then built a community-owned microgrid for the town.

🇺🇬 Uganda · Kisiizi Hospital

A Church of Uganda mission hospital in the Kigezi highlands has run its wards on its own waterfall's hydropower since 1958, and sells the spare electricity to roughly 400 neighbours.

🇵🇪 Peru · AGUAPAN (Asociación de Guardianes de Papa Nativa del Centro del Perú)

Quechua and mestizo highland farmers organized into a self-governed association to keep thousands of native Andean potato varieties alive in the ground, not just in gene banks.

🇪🇹 Ethiopia · Mela for Her

Mela, whose name means 'solution' in Amharic, employs Ethiopian women to handcraft reusable pads and period underwear and sells them door to door through 179 women agents.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Africa Sand Dam Foundation

A Kenyan NGO that has helped drylands communities build 680 stone sand dams across seasonal rivers, banking rainy-season flow underground where it can't evaporate or run dry.

🇸🇱 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.

🌍 Global · Bat Conservation International

Volunteers and researchers are replanting a 1,200-km chain of agaves along the US-Mexico border to refuel three species of endangered nectar-feeding bats.

🇸🇿 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.

🇷🇼 Rwanda · Ampersand

A motorcycle taxi driver cannot wait two hours for a battery to charge — so Ampersand built a network where you swap it in three minutes instead.

🇦🇴 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.

🇵🇪 Peru · Aquafondo (Fondo de Agua para Lima y Callao)

Lima's water fund is rehabilitating pre-Inca infiltration canals high in the Andes so rain captured in the wet season keeps the capital's rivers flowing through the dry months.

🇦🇷 Argentina · FACCyR (Federación Argentina de Cartoneros, Carreros y Recicladores)

In August 2025 FACCyR president Sergio Sánchez chained himself to Buenos Aires' Public Space Ministry and went on hunger strike to restore the transport that gets recycling families to work.

🇸🇻 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.

🇸🇴 Somalia · BECO

Somalia has some of the most expensive electricity on earth, all of it from diesel — until a Mogadishu utility started building solar instead.

🇧🇩 Bangladesh · Baragangina Resource Management Organisation

Fishing villages around a north-east Bangladeshi haor agreed to stop fishing 170 hectares of it entirely — and within a few years were catching twenty times more everywhere else.

🇦🇷 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.

🇳🇵 Nepal · MinErgy

Making the fire travel a zigzag path instead of a straight line through a brick kiln burns the coal more completely — and takes a startling bite out of the smoke over Kathmandu.

🇦🇹 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.

🇺🇸 United States · Blue Star Recyclers

A Colorado nonprofit recycler where most employees are autistic or otherwise disabled, proving ethical e-waste recycling and inclusive employment go hand in hand.

🇨🇴 Colombia · Asociación Cooperativa de Recicladores de Bogotá (ARB)

Founded by waste pickers from Bogotá's dump in 1990, the ARB still negotiates directly with the city and now fights for recyclers' social protection under Colombia's new Decree 0271 of 2026.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Movimento Nacional dos Catadores de Materiais Recicláveis (MNCR)

When a catadora from the MNCR's national coordination handed the presidential sash to Lula in 2023, it was the culmination of a movement that began with a 1,700-person congress in a Brasília hall.

🇧🇷 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.

🇨🇴 Colombia · Amazon Conservation Team

Sixty families in Colombia's most deforested department are raising native stingless bees as a sweeter, forest-friendly alternative to cattle ranching and coca.

🇿🇦 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.

🇧🇮 Burundi · Burundi Red Cross (Croix-Rouge du Burundi)

Burundi's first-ever anticipatory cash payments landed in Rumonge days before the November 2023 floods, and the Red Cross's 680,000 hill-by-hill volunteers are now backing a CHF 778,786 flood protocol approved in July 2026.

🇬🇩 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.

🇪🇬 Egypt · Zabaleen Syndicate

When reverse vending machines that pay phone credit for bottles appeared in Giza in August 2026, Cairo's garbage collectors took the fight to live television and got the right to empty the machines themselves.

🇺🇸 United States · Camphill Village Copake

America's oldest Camphill community, where adults with developmental disabilities live, farm, and garden together on a 750-acre biodynamic homestead in New York's Hudson Valley.

🌍 Global · Sustainable Fibre Alliance

The Sustainable Fibre Alliance certifies cashmere herders in Mongolia and China against a standard that ties market access to rangeland health, tackling overgrazing driven by global demand for cashmere goats.

🇨🇱 Chile · ANARCH (Asociación Nacional de Recicladores de Chile)

Since Chile's extended-producer-responsibility law took effect, ANARCH has helped grassroots recyclers go from loose street collectors to 47 registered cooperatives with balers and electric tricycles.

🇫🇯 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.

🇵🇪 Peru · Nature and Culture International

Harvesters used to cut down a whole aguaje palm to reach one bunch of fruit; in Maijuna territory they now climb it, and the peat swamp underneath stays wet.

🇧🇧 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.

🇦🇷 Argentina · Fundación Humedales / Wetlands International LAC

From the Pantanal to the Paraná Delta runs one of the last great river systems on Earth with no dams across it — and a ten-year programme trying to keep it that way.

🇦🇿 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.

🇧🇪 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.

🇭🇷 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.

🇹🇱 Timor-Leste · Cruz Vermelha de Timor-Leste (Timor-Leste Red Cross, CVTL)

Timor-Leste's own Red Cross has pre-agreed, pre-funded flood actions for six villages, so seed-saving drums, mosquito nets and first-aid kits are already in place before the river rises.

🇿🇦 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.

🇸🇳 Senegal · Bokk Diom Association

Bokk Diom's 1,300 pickers, who have worked West Africa's biggest dump for decades, stopped Dakar's garbage trucks in 2023 and are now demanding a just transition as the World Bank-financed closure of Mbeubeuss proceeds.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · Nipe Fagio

In one Dar es Salaam ward, waste picker cooperatives run door-to-door collection that diverts 95% of waste from disposal, and the NGO behind it helped launch a national waste pickers' association.

🇺🇸 United States · Groundwork Hudson Valley

Groundwork Hudson Valley uncovered a river buried under a Yonkers parking lot for 90 years, turning it back into a living stream and public park.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · Tanzania Forest Conservation Group (TFCG)

Tanzania's largest forest-focused NGO works with mountain communities to protect the ancient Eastern Arc cloud forests.

🇧🇩 Bangladesh · Bangladesh Waste Pickers Union (BWPU)

Dumpsite pickers around Dhaka's Matuail landfill, led by women, have formed a union demanding to be legally recognised as environmental workers.

🇨🇴 Colombia · Fundación Iguaraya

On Colombia's Caribbean coast, 27 Afro-descendant and Indigenous fruit-growing families are each getting a solar irrigation system, and their pulp plant is going solar too.

🇦🇹 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.

🇬🇶 Equatorial Guinea · African Marine Conservation Organisation (AMCO)

Atlantic humpback dolphins have no idea where Cameroon ends and Equatorial Guinea begins, so a new four-year EU-funded project is managing two national parks on either side of the line as one coastline.

🇩🇴 Dominican Republic · Dominican Red Cross (Cruz Roja Dominicana)

A forecast of 100 mm of rain in two days is the tripwire that releases pre-funded Dominican Red Cross aid to families before a tropical storm lands.

🇵🇭 Philippines · Dwellbeing

A Manila social enterprise run entirely by a Deaf team, turning discarded bottles, jars, and fabric into home and wellness goods that keep waste out of landfills.

🇿🇦 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.

🇮🇱 Israel · Ecology for a Protected Community (אקולוגיה לקהילה מוגנת)

A Galilee e-waste recycling company where three in four employees have a physical, cognitive, or sensory disability, turning discarded electronics into dignified careers.

🇪🇨 Ecuador · RENAREC (Red Nacional de Recicladores del Ecuador)

Led by Quito recycler Elbia Pisuña, who began sorting at age 14, RENAREC speaks for a workforce that recovers around 90,000 tonnes of material a year.

🌍 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.

🇲🇽 Mexico · Reforestamos México

Trained ejido brigadistas clear firebreaks by hand and manage post-fire fuels so their communal forests can survive Mexico's worsening dry seasons.

🇬🇪 Georgia · Biological Farming Association Elkana

Georgian farmers rebuilt a organic-farming union from 9 founding members into a nationwide network that is bringing indigenous Caucasus wheat varieties, wiped out under Soviet collectivization, back into highland fields.

🇫🇷 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.

🇪🇹 Ethiopia · EthioTrees Ecosystem Restoration Association

Landless and smallholder farmers in Ethiopia's Tembien highlands are regenerating degraded mountain slopes with exclosures, hillside terraces and native trees, funded by carbon credits they control.

🇪🇹 Ethiopia · Ethiopian Orthodox Church Development and Inter-Church Aid Commission (EOC-DICAC)

In a country that has lost most of its forest, small wooded islands around Orthodox churches are often the only native trees for miles, and the church's development commission now helps neighbouring farmers protect and expand them.

🇰🇭 Cambodia · Fisheries Action Coalition Team (FACT)

A Phnom Penh-based coalition of Cambodian NGOs helping lakeside communities set up protected fish refuges in the flooded forests of Tonle Sap, Southeast Asia's largest lake.

🇪🇨 Ecuador · Fondo para la Protección del Agua (FONAG)

The world's first water fund pays to protect and restore Quito's high-Andean páramo grassland, the source of most of the city's drinking water.

🇰🇪 Kenya · FRADI (Fraternity for Development Integrated)

A Congolese refugee who arrived in Kakuma with nothing built the camp's largest plastic recycling enterprise, turning waste into jobs.

🇮🇪 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.

🇹🇩 Chad · FairClimateFund

Dutch climate NGO FairClimateFund and local partner ADES supply women-assembled solar cookers to Sudanese refugee camps in eastern Chad, cutting firewood collection and CO2 emissions.

🌍 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.

🇰🇭 Cambodia · Global Fashion Agenda

Cambodia's garment sector throws away an estimated 140,000 tonnes of textile waste a year, and a partnership launched in Phnom Penh in 2025 is teaching 50 factories to sort and sell it instead.

🇪🇸 Spain · Pau Costa Foundation

Catalan shepherds get paid in meat and cheese, not cash, for grazing their flocks through fire-critical corridors mapped by the region's firefighters.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Flone Initiative

After women were stripped at Nairobi bus stages, a group started training the matatu crews themselves rather than only condemning them.

🇱🇻 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.

🇷🇼 Rwanda · Forest of Hope Association (FHA)

A Rwandan-led NGO has regrown more than two-thirds of the Gishwati forest that genocide-era displacement helped destroy, turning restoration into a path to reconciliation and livelihoods.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Friends of Karura Forest

A community forest association turned a logged, squatted and dumped-on patch of Nairobi into one of the world's largest thriving urban forests.

🇱🇷 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.

🇷🇴 Romania · Fundatia ADEPT (Agricultural Development and Environmental Protection in Transylvania)

A Saschiz-based foundation works with farmers to keep Transylvania's flower-rich hay meadows mown and grazed the old way, protecting one of Europe's last great semi-natural grasslands.

🇲🇽 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.

🇮🇪 Ireland · Bounce Back Recycling

A Galway social enterprise dismantles mattresses by hand and has kept 50,000 of them out of Irish landfills and ditches since 2017.

🇰🇪 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.

🇬🇭 Ghana · NUS Network-Ghana

Ghana had no community seed banks until NUS Network-Ghana set up a pilot at Adawso in 2023, and its newest at Abrewankor now holds 58 local varieties including fonio.

🇬🇭 Ghana · Dream Renewables

At Jantuakrom, nurses who once delivered babies by torchlight now run a vaccine fridge on a 3.6 kW rooftop array that four local trainees helped install and still maintain.

🇲🇾 Malaysia · Impactlution

In Selangor, women's craft groups wash, crush and cast used wine and beer bottles into glass-sand planters, trays and coasters, in a country where glass recycling sits near 10%.

🇪🇸 Spain · Fundació Espigoladors

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

🌍 Global · Gola Rainforest Conservation (GRC-LG)

Declared a Transboundary Peace Park by Sierra Leone and Liberia after their civil wars, the Gola rainforest now channels UN peacebuilding funds into joint conservation across a once-contested border.

🇰🇪 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.

🌍 Global · Tree Aid

Tree Aid works with communities across Africa's Sahel to grow trees and restore degraded drylands, turning shrinking farmland back into productive ground.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · Grumeti Fund

Once-barren, poached-out savanna in the western Serengeti corridor has been brought back to life through anti-poaching patrols, fire management and invasive-plant clearance.

🇹🇹 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.

🇬🇹 Guatemala · Guatemalan Red Cross (Cruz Roja Guatemalteca)

A 60 percent chance of a tropical storm in Guatemala's warning zone is enough to release multipurpose cash to flood-exposed families 3 to 5 days early.

🇭🇹 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.

🇹🇷 Türkiye · Buğday Ekolojik Yaşamı Destekleme Derneği (Buğday Association)

Buğday's seed-swap network, running since 2011, now has a dozen Hatay farmers growing local karakılçık durum wheat agroecologically on 100 decares of a chemical-heavy plain.

🇨🇿 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.

🇭🇳 Honduras · Honduran Red Cross (Cruz Roja Hondureña)

When forecasters see a tropical storm 3 to 5 days out, Honduran Red Cross volunteers are pre-cleared to hand out cash and 72-hour water kits before the rivers rise.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Hortas Cariocas (Prefeitura do Rio de Janeiro)

Rio de Janeiro's city government pays residents to grow food on vacant lots and school grounds, turning idle urban land into tons of fresh produce for vulnerable communities.

🇮🇳 India · Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh (HIAL)

In the cold desert of Ladakh, engineers and villagers freeze winter meltwater into towering "ice stupas" that release irrigation water just when spring-sown crops need it most.

🇨🇦 Canada · Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated

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

🇮🇩 Indonesia · AB2TI (Asosiasi Bank Benih dan Teknologi Tani Indonesia)

Indonesia's farmer-run seed bank association says its member groups have bred some 3,600 crossed rice varieties, mostly from local germplasm, without waiting on a lab.

🇮🇶 Iraq · Rwanga Foundation

The Erbil-based Rwanga Foundation took Kulak village off the grid with nearly 200 solar panels, and has since taken five Kurdistan villages completely off the grid.

🇹🇷 Türkiye · Istanbul Recycling Workers' Association (Geri Donusum Iscileri Dernegi)

Istanbul's recycling workers, who by the president's account collect 80 percent of Turkey's household waste, have organised their own association and are now issuing members ID cards and numbered depots under municipal rules.

🇮🇹 Italy · Rete Semi Rurali

Rete Semi Rurali's Casa delle Sementi mails local bean, sunflower, tomato, rice and maize seed to farmers who must return double the seed they received.

🇯🇲 Jamaica · Jamaica Red Cross

Days before Category 5 Hurricane Melissa hit in October 2025, the Jamaica Red Cross unlocked J$16 million to stock shelters in eight parishes.

🇿🇦 South Africa · African Reclaimers Organisation

The street pickers who haul most of Johannesburg's recyclable packaging to market now have their own democratic union of more than 5,500 reclaimers, and they insist on being called reclaimers, not waste pickers.

🇳🇦 Namibia · Nyae Nyae Development Foundation

Backed by the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation, the Ju/'hoansi San of Namibia's Kalahari run an early-season controlled-burning program that has turned a conservancy once devastated by wildfire into a model of community fire mapping.

🇸🇪 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.

🌍 Global · Réseau Billital Maroobé (RBM)

Founded by herders themselves in 2003, Réseau Billital Maroobé unites pastoral organizations across nine West and Central African countries to keep cross-border transhumance corridors open and defend mobile grazing as the Sahel's rangelands dry out.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Coastal and Marine Resource Development (COMRED)

At Munje on Kenya's south coast, a 40-hectare patch of reef is left alone for months, then opened for a few days so women can gather octopus that have grown fat.

🇮🇳 India · Ka Synjuk Ki Hima Arliang Wah Umiam Mawphlang Welfare Society

India's first REDD+ project pays indigenous Khasi communities to protect and restore Meghalaya's sacred cloud forests.

🇮🇳 India · Kheyti

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

🇷🇼 Rwanda · Kosmotive

Kosmotive, founded in Kigali in 2014, sews reusable KosmoPads that its site says have prevented 7,200 tons of plastic waste.

🇦🇴 Angola · Fundação Kissama

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

🇰🇷 South Korea · Native Seedream (토종씨드림)

Native Seedream tracks down the elderly farmers who still hold Korea's heirloom seeds and has collected more than 10,000 native varieties since 2008.

🇿🇦 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.

🇲🇾 Malaysia · The Lost Food Project

Staff stationed inside Kuala Lumpur's wholesale market pull perfectly edible vegetables and fruit off the discard line, and in 2025 The Lost Food Project turned 2.9 million kg of it into 8.5 million meals.

🇳🇵 Nepal · Local Initiatives for Biodiversity, Research and Development (LI-BIRD)

A Pokhara-based NGO helps Himalayan hill and mountain farmers run their own community seed banks, keeping climate-resilient local rice, taro and yam landraces from disappearing.

🇨🇬 Republic of the Congo · Wildlife Conservation Society

Twenty thousand people live inside this flooded forest in the Republic of Congo, and the reserve they co-manage sits on more peat than any other protected area in Central Africa.

🇨🇬 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.

🇲🇬 Madagascar · Masontsika

Masontsika's Bazary model lets villagers rent solar lamps, charge phones and chill food at a health centre, and that income pays for the clinic's own power to run free.

🇲🇬 Madagascar · Malagasy Red Cross Society (Croix-Rouge Malagasy)

Two days before Cyclone Gezani hit Madagascar's east coast, Malagasy Red Cross volunteers knocked on 600 doors, put 630 households' cash in hand and opened eight evacuation sites.

🇲🇱 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.

🇲🇱 Mali · Mali Red Cross (Croix-Rouge malienne)

In Mali's Mopti region the Red Cross acted when the Bani River passed 633 cm at Sofara, handing out sandbags and shovels and broadcasting warnings in Bamana and French before the floodwater peaked.

🇲🇱 Mali · Mali-Folkecenter Nyetaa

A Bamako NGO founded in 1999 says it has set up 17,000 solar panels in Malian schools, maternity clinics and emergency rooms, and now funds solar-pumped market gardens run largely by women.

🇮🇩 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.

🇵🇭 Philippines · Mobility Awards

Filipino cyclists ranked their own cities and malls on how bike-friendly they actually were, and the mayors started competing for the rating.

🇲🇳 Mongolia · Mongolian Red Cross Society

When Mongolia's weather service flags a killer dzud winter, the Red Cross wires cash to herder families before the snow, and studies found it doubled the odds they saved their horses.

🇿🇦 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.

🇬🇭 Ghana · AquaLife Conservancy

In five fishing towns of Ghana's Ahanta West district, fishers once paid by the fin are now trained to release critically endangered guitarfish, and some earn more from snail farms and soap than from the sea.

🇲🇿 Mozambique · Mozambique Red Cross Society (Cruz Vermelha de Moçambique)

When Cyclone Gezani bore down on Inhambane in February 2026, Mozambican Red Cross volunteers were already reinforcing houses and schools with pre-positioned materials, days before the wind arrived.

🇸🇬 Singapore · World Toilet Organization

Founded by Jack Sim, known as Mr. Toilet, this Singapore nonprofit created World Toilet Day, later recognised by the UN General Assembly in 2013, and runs a World Toilet College that trained over 5,000 people in India in its first 24 months.

🇲🇻 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.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · National Energy Action

In one of the richest countries in the world, millions of people ration their heating — and this charity has spent forty years arguing that is a policy choice.

🇺🇸 United States · Loess Canyons Rangeland Alliance

Nebraska ranchers formed the state's first prescribed burn association, pooling equipment and labor to torch encroaching cedar trees and bring their grasslands back to life.

🇳🇬 Nigeria · Hinckley Recycling

Hinckley turns the 100,000-strong army of informal e-waste scavengers around Lagos into trained, protected, paid collectors, and is building Nigeria's first lead-acid and lithium battery recycling lines.

🇳🇬 Nigeria · Pad-Up Creations

A factory in Minna, Niger State, stitches washable period kits that women sales agents now carry to 21 African countries.

🇦🇲 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.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Nyatike Mirema Community Forest Association

A community-led reforestation drive in western Kenya where widows and people with disabilities earn a living growing tree seedlings instead of begging.

🇬🇦 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.

🇵🇼 Palau · Ebiil Society

In Palau, where sea cucumbers are a women's fishery, local women now raise sandfish seed and farm giant clams instead of stripping the reef.

🇳🇮 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.

🇨🇭 Switzerland · Pro Specie Rara

Since 1982, this Swiss foundation has kept old alpine grain, vegetable and fruit varieties and mountain livestock breeds alive by growing them, not just storing them, on working farms.

🇧🇷 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.

🇮🇳 India · SWaCH Pune Seva Sahakari Sanstha

A wholly worker-owned cooperative of Pune's waste pickers now walks into roughly one million properties a day, collecting the city's waste door to door.

🇺🇸 United States · Malpai Borderlands Group

A collaborative of Arizona-New Mexico borderlands ranchers invented "grassbanking" — trading grazing rest on drought-hit ranches for conservation easements — to keep nearly a million acres of open range intact and productive.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Instituto SOS Pantanal

After record wildfires torched a quarter of the Pantanal wetland, this Brazilian NGO is paying Indigenous communities to grow and plant native seedlings that heal burned springs and riverbanks.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Re-Cycle

A UK charity rescues unwanted bicycles from British landfill, ships them by the container-load to African partners, and puts low-carbon transport into the hands of rural communities.

🇦🇹 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.

🇮🇳 India · Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR)

WOTR mobilizes villages across India's drought-prone drylands to build check-dams, contour trenches and ponds that recharge groundwater and bring barren common land back into production.

🇧🇴 Bolivia · Fundación Natura Bolivia

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

🇮🇳 India · Centre for Pastoralism

The Centre for Pastoralism works with India's estimated 10-20 million mobile herders to reclaim traditional grazing grounds under the Forest Rights Act and prove that seasonal migration is a sound way to manage rangeland, not a relic to be fenced off.

🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan · Red Crescent Society of Kyrgyzstan

On 15 July 2025 the Kyrgyz Red Crescent acted on a temperature forecast days ahead of a heatwave, delivering hygiene kits, food parcels and kits for children's stress to 15,000 people in the south before the peak hit.

🇹🇯 Tajikistan · Red Crescent Society of Tajikistan

In Tajikistan's mountains, the Red Crescent has already stored window insulation, floor insulation and electric heaters for 1,233 households, ready to ship the day a deadly cold wave is forecast.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Rede de Sementes do Cerrado (RSC)

A Brasília-based seed network pays indigenous, family-farmer and urban collectors to harvest native Cerrado grasses and wildflowers, turning them back into standing savanna.

🇨🇱 Chile · Fundación Reforestemos

Born out of the 2011-12 Torres del Paine wildfire, this Chilean foundation now runs the country's largest restoration campaign, planting native trees and rebuilding green space after each new round of megafires.

🇦🇷 Argentina · Ovis 21

Ovis 21 turned holistic planned grazing into a certified regenerative wool supply chain that is healing over a million hectares of Patagonia's historically overgrazed sheep-ranching grasslands.

🇨🇮 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.

🇲🇦 Morocco · High Atlas Foundation

High Atlas Foundation runs community tree nurseries that turn arid, degraded ground on the edge of the Sahara into productive fruit and nut orchards.

🇬🇲 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.

🇬🇭 Ghana · Clean Team Ghana

Clean Team Ghana rents families in Kumasi a private in-home toilet and sends a Ghanaian crew to swap the sealed waste container for a clean one every week.

🇱🇹 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.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Associação Caatinga

Associação Caatinga restores Brazil's semi-arid Caatinga biome using a long-root seedling technique that more than doubles tree survival on degraded, drought-hit land.

🇬🇪 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.

🇷🇴 Romania · Asociația Eco Ruralis

Eco Ruralis is growing experimental plots of the nearly vanished Romanian broad bean in two Buzau villages, while mailing free heirloom seed to anyone who joins.

🌍 Global · Association la Voûte Nubienne

A corrugated metal roof in the Sahel turns a house into an oven. The alternative is three thousand years old, made of mud, and needs no timber at all.

🇭🇰 Hong Kong · Rooftop Republic Urban Farming

This Hong Kong social enterprise has turned dozens of idle rooftops atop malls, offices and schools into working organic farms.

🇷🇼 Rwanda · Rwanda Wildlife Conservation Association

Rwanda's national bird was being kept as a status symbol in hotel gardens; a vet offered an amnesty, and now the cranes are back breeding in the country's biggest marsh.

🇮🇳 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.

🇸🇻 El Salvador · Salvadoran Red Cross (Cruz Roja Salvadoreña)

In May 2026 the Salvadoran Red Cross triggered its drought protocol on a rainfall forecast, putting cash and trucked water into Morazán and La Unión before crops failed.

🇬🇧 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.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · Pastoral Women's Council

Founded by ten Maasai women in 1997, the Pastoral Women's Council has helped over a thousand Maasai women win formal title to rangeland in a culture where women traditionally could not own land.

🇨🇦 Canada · Secwepemcúl'ecw Restoration and Stewardship Society (SRSS)

Eight Secwépemc communities formed their own restoration society to replant nearly 200,000 scorched hectares after British Columbia's Elephant Hill wildfire, blending Indigenous knowledge with forestry science.

🇵🇰 Pakistan · Rural Aid Pakistan

In Punjab's Narowal District, seven solar-powered irrigation systems let farming households ditch diesel, save water and diversify their crops, and 1,280 women were trained alongside.

🇧🇹 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.

🇸🇽 Sint Maarten · Nature Foundation Sint Maarten

Tiger sharks, Caribbean reef sharks and spotted eagle rays are born in Sint Maarten's lagoon, and the island's Nature Foundation is paying fishers to help keep them alive.

🇸🇰 Slovakia · AfB Slovakia

AfB Slovakia wipes, repairs and resells corporate laptops and phones with a 96% reuse rate, and in doing so employs people with health disabilities.

🌍 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.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Soil for Life

Since 2002 this Cape Town nonprofit has taught more than 9,000 people to turn small urban plots into organic food gardens that feed their families.

🇮🇳 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.

🇰🇭 Cambodia · Pteah Baitong

Pteah Baitong sells irrigation as a service, so Cambodian rice farmers share a solar pumping station instead of buying diesel pumps, and a Kampong Thom community now grows two rice crops a year.

🌍 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.

🇨🇦 Canada · Sole Food Street Farms (Cultivate Canada Society)

Vacant, often contaminated lots in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside became paid urban farmland for people rebuilding their lives after addiction, homelessness or mental illness.

🇸🇧 Solomon Islands · Kastom Gaden Association

For a one-off lifetime fee of $15, any Solomon Islands farmer can join a seed-and-cutting swap network run out of a seed bank at Burns Creek.

🇱🇨 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.

🇸🇸 South Sudan · South Sudan Red Cross Society

After four straight record flood seasons displaced an estimated 1.5 million South Sudanese, the national Red Cross has pre-agreed funds to act two months ahead along the White Nile and the Sudd wetland.

🇰🇳 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.

🇻🇬 British Virgin Islands · Association of Reef Keepers

In the British Virgin Islands, twenty years of tagging data show hawksbill turtles declining while greens increase, in a place where fishers and scientists still argue over which story is true.

🇹🇼 Taiwan · Tse-Xin Organic Agriculture Foundation (慈心有機農業發展基金會)

Working with a government seed station, Tse-Xin collected 216 millet lines from Indigenous tribes in eastern Taiwan and returned most of the seed so it stays in the villages.

🇧🇪 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.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · ELICO Foundation (Energy and Livelihoods for Communities)

A Dar es Salaam non-profit has put solar power into rural health facilities serving more than 584,000 patients, so ultrasound machines, lab kit and vaccine fridges stop going dark.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · Action for Ocean (AFO)

Where Kilwa villagers fence off their octopus reefs for a few months, the average octopus has grown from 500 g to 975 g.

🇵🇭 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.

🇹🇭 Thailand · BioThai Foundation

BioThai has spent nearly three decades backing farmer networks that recover native rice varieties, local vegetables and tropical fruits, and in September 2026 it rallied 146 groups against UPOV 1991 seed rules.

🇹🇭 Thailand · WWF Thailand

In Surat Thani, WWF is helping a Saleng Association of informal tricycle-and-sidecar waste collectors sign formal MoUs with junk shops so the shops owe the collectors incentives.

🇿🇦 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.

🇵🇭 Philippines · Malampaya Foundation

The Philippines' native giant clam was written off as extinct in the 1980s, until a hatchery in Palawan found survivors, spawned 132 million of them, and started planting them back on protected reefs.

🇳🇦 Namibia · Swakopmund Matters

Namibia's cold Benguela upwelling feeds a fishery employing 22,000 people; a proposal to vacuum phosphate off the seabed beneath it has been fought to a standstill for fifteen years.

🇩🇰 Denmark · Stop Spild Af Mad

A consumer movement started in 2008 by Russian-born Selina Juul, Stop Spild Af Mad has run more than 200 projects and passed over 300 tonnes of surplus food to vulnerable Danes.

🌍 Global · International Alliance of Waste Pickers

A democratic global union of 59 waste picker organisations in 38 countries took its members' demands for a just transition all the way to the UN plastics treaty talks in Geneva.

🇮🇳 India · People United for Better Living in Calcutta (PUBLIC)

Kolkata's sewage is cleaned for free by fishponds its own fisherfolk built — and the only reason those ponds still exist is a public interest case filed in 1992.

🇿🇦 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.

🇧🇩 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.

🇦🇫 Afghanistan · UN Women Afghanistan

Thirty-five women run businesses in a Bamyan market that the grid never reached — so the roof became the power station.

🇫🇯 Fiji · Pacific Network on Globalisation

Mining companies court Pacific governments one at a time; this small Suva outfit does the unglamorous work of making sure the region negotiates as a bloc instead.

🇦🇺 Australia · Rural Fire Brigades Association Queensland

A peak body of everyday Queenslanders backs over 1,400 volunteer rural fire brigades with grants, gear and advocacy, forming the backbone of bushfire defense across the state.

🇩🇰 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.

🌍 Global · Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives

An incinerator is usually sold to a city as the modern answer to its rubbish, and it is almost always built next to the poorest neighbourhood — which is why the network fighting them is made of waste pickers.

🇵🇪 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.

🇹🇴 Tonga · Civil Society Forum of Tonga

Tonga sponsors a Canadian company's claim to mine the Pacific abyss; Tongan civil society has spent six years asking its own government to withdraw, and is now petitioning the monarch.

🇲🇽 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.

🇮🇳 India · Under the Mango Tree Society

A Mumbai-based nonprofit trains marginal and tribal farmers to keep indigenous bees, lifting both crop pollination and household incomes.

🇺🇾 Uruguay · UCRUS (Unión de Clasificadores de Residuos Urbanos Sólidos)

On 17 September 2025 Uruguay's wage councils created Subgroup 6.3, giving the people who collect and sort commercial and industrial waste a labor and wage framework for the first time.

🇪🇬 Egypt · VeryNile

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

🇻🇳 Vietnam · VietCycle

Hanoi-based VietCycle has grown a network of Vietnam's ve chai scrap collectors, mostly women, from 1,200 to about 3,000 by giving them protective gear, bicycles and social insurance.

🇰🇲 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.

🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea · Tree Kangaroo Conservation Program (Woodland Park Zoo)

Papua New Guinea's first conservation area protects a cloud-forested mountain range as the last stronghold of the endangered Matschie's tree kangaroo.

🇨🇲 Cameroon · National Union of Scrap Metal Workers (SYNAFSEC)

Cameroon's scrap metal workers' union and the ILO cleared a derelict Yaoundé site in 2026 by dismantling 75 end-of-life buses and minibuses in two weeks, bringing protective equipment and safety training to more than 150 informal workers.

🇾🇪 Yemen · UNDP Yemen

Ten women in Abs district built and now run the first private solar grid in a country where the war took the power out years ago.

🇿🇲 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.

🇵🇰 Pakistan · Heritage Foundation of Pakistan

Yasmeen Lari stopped designing landmark buildings at seventy and started teaching flood survivors to build their own shelters out of bamboo, lime and mud — for about forty dollars each.

🇿🇼 Zimbabwe · Zimbabwe Red Cross Society

Zimbabwe's Red Cross handed drought-tolerant seed and livestock vaccines to farmers in Binga before the 2023 El Nino drought took hold, triggered by a forecast, not a failed harvest.

🇿🇼 Zimbabwe · Community Technology Development Trust (CTDT)

Zimbabwean farmers run village seed banks stocked with sorghum, pearl millet, Bambara groundnut and cowpea landraces that CTDT helped them recover, some of which now sit in the Svalbard vault.

🇦🇹 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.