When we hear the word innovation, we often think of new technologies or silver bullet solutions — like hydrogen fuel cells or a cure for cancer. To be sure, breakthroughs are vital: antibiotics and vaccines, for example, transformed global health. But as we’ve argued in Fixes, some of the greatest advances come from taking old ideas or technologies and making them accessible to millions of people who are underserved. One area...

Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot...

Lucknow : The bandh call by Kisan Sangharsh Samiti (KSS) in the state on Wednesday, received response mainly in districts of Western Uttar Pradesh like Aligarh, Mathura, Agra, Ghaziabad and Gautam Buddha Nagar. Manvir Singh Teotia, who is heading the KSS, has rushed to New Delhi to meet the Prime Minister. The AICC General Secretary Rahul Gandhi may be present at the meeting, said sources. In Etmadpur area of Agra, farmers...

The bandh call by Kisan Sangharsh Samiti (KSS) in the state on Wednesday, received response mainly in districts of Western Uttar Pradesh like Aligarh, Mathura, Agra, Ghaziabad and Gautam Buddha Nagar. Manvir Singh Teotia, who is heading the KSS, has rushed to New Delhi to meet the Prime Minister. The AICC General Secretary Rahul Gandhi may be present at the meeting, said sources. In Etmadpur area of Agra, farmers clashed with the...

CELIA ORBOC, a cake-seller in the Philippines, spent her little stipend on a wooden shack, giving her five children a roof over their heads for the first time. In Kyrgyzstan Sharmant Oktomanova spent hers buying flour to feed six children. In Haiti President René Préval praises a dairy co-operative that gives mothers milk and yogurt when their children go to school. These are examples of the world’s favourite new anti-poverty device,...