Social Equity

In 2000, the Brazilian municipality of Sobral had a problem that seemed unsolvable. Nestled in Ceará, one of Brazil’s poorest states, only 49% of second-graders could read at grade level.1 By 2004, that number had reached 92%.1 Today, Ceará has the lowest learning poverty rate in Brazil, with 10 of the country’s top 20 performing municipalities.1 Sobral’s transformation wasn’t magic. It was method: structured teaching materials, intensive teacher support, and results-based financing that tied 18% of tax transfers to educational outcomes.1 The approach spread across the state, proving that even the most disadvantaged communities can achieve what wealthy nations often struggle to deliver. ...

The Invisible Crisis We Can Actually Fix When we think of extinction, we picture dinosaurs or dodos, dramatic endings that make headlines. But right now, something quieter is happening in your backyard soil, in the stream you pass on your commute, in the meadow at the edge of town. Small creatures that hold ecosystems together are vanishing. Not in headline-grabbing events, but in silent, localized disappearances too subtle to register on global scales12. ...

Nestlé paid just $200 per year to extract water in Michigan while generating $340 million in revenue12. That’s not a typo—a multinational corporation paid less than what many Americans spend on a single month of bottled water to drain millions of gallons from public resources. This extreme example reveals a deeper crisis. The bottled water industry generates over $340 billion annually while 2.1 billion people lack safely managed drinking water access34567. Corporations charge consumers 2,000 to 3,300 times more than tap water costs, extracting extraordinary profits from what should be a universally accessible public good89. ...

One copper mine’s decision will secure drinking water for one million people by 2030. Los Bronces mine in Chile is ending all freshwater withdrawals, freeing between 14.7 and 43.2 million liters daily for communities in one of the world’s most water-stressed regions. This commitment represents the mining industry’s first large-scale attempt to operate entirely on desalinated seawater in a megadrought zone. ...

Five Farms, Six Billion Lives At the heart of global food security lies an apparent contradiction. While industrial agriculture dominates headlines and policy discussions, 608 million family farms scattered across the developing world quietly produce 35% of the planet’s food on just 12% of agricultural land123. These smallholder farmers, working plots smaller than most suburban backyards, support approximately 3 billion people45 - nearly 40% of humanity. Their story reveals both the remarkable resilience of traditional farming systems and the urgent need for transformation as planetary boundaries strain under agricultural pressure. ...