World Solve

Poor storage, lack of cold chains, and bad rural roads mean food rots before reaching markets even amid hunger. Low-cost solar cold storage and mobile market-linkage apps are viable business opportunities.

Nearly a third of rural Africans live more than 2km from an all-season road, isolating farmers from buyers. Low-cost road-building techniques and community-maintained feeder roads could improve access.

Laying fiber to remote areas is costly, so many villages rely on expensive, slow mobile data instead. Community network cooperatives and satellite backhaul could bridge the rural-urban digital divide.

Many skilled developers leave for remote jobs abroad or emigrate entirely due to limited local opportunities. Africa-focused tech hubs and outsourcing platforms could retain more talent domestically.

Landslides regularly cut off remote mountain roads, blocking ground vehicles from delivering critical blood units to rural hospitals.

This gut infection frequently returns after treatment, partly because antibiotics disrupt the broader gut microbiome that would normally help prevent it. Better prevention of recurrence remains an unresolved clinical challenge.

In systems with many competing parties, forming a stable governing coalition can require compromises so broad that clear, decisive policy becomes difficult to achieve. This instability can leave important issues unresolved for years.

Some high offices have strict term limits while others, sometimes in the same country, have none at all, allowing certain officials to accumulate power for decades. This inconsistency undermines the broader principle term limits are meant to protect.

Zoning meetings and planning hearings are frequently held at inconvenient times with minimal outreach, meaning decisions affecting entire neighborhoods get made with only a handful of residents aware. Broader participation methods remain underused.

As populations shift toward cities, rural areas can be left with proportionally less political power even though they still depend heavily on government services like roads and healthcare access. Balancing this representation gap remains an unresolved tension in many democracies.

Public procurement, from building roads to buying medical supplies, remains one of the most common channels for corruption worldwide. Stronger, harder-to-manipulate bidding systems remain unevenly adopted.

Many global bodies depend heavily on voluntary contributions rather than fixed dues, letting big funders push their own priorities ahead of the institution's broader mission. This undermines the independence these institutions are supposed to have.

High childcare costs push many parents, disproportionately mothers, out of the workforce entirely or into reduced hours. Making quality childcare broadly affordable remains an unresolved economic and social policy gap.

Remittances sent to Indonesia from diaspora communities abroad are subject to high transfer fees, reducing the effective value delivered to recipient households who depend on this income.

GDP growth doesn't capture things like wellbeing, environmental health, or inequality, yet it remains the default measure of a country's economic success. A broader, widely adopted alternative measure remains unsettled.

As AI boosts productivity in many industries, the resulting financial gains tend to concentrate with business owners rather than being broadly shared. A fairer distribution mechanism remains a significant unresolved economic question.

Countries rich in oil, minerals, or gas sometimes see little of that wealth reach ordinary citizens due to corruption or unfair contracts. Ensuring resource wealth translates into broad public benefit remains a persistent unsolved problem.

Genetic testing can reveal risk for serious inherited conditions, but cost and access limit it mostly to wealthier patients and countries. Broader affordability could catch preventable conditions far earlier for many more people.

Unlike infectious diseases, cancer arises from a person's own cells mutating, making a universal vaccine far more complex to design. Progress exists for a few cancer types, but a broadly effective approach remains unsolved.

Faster memory tends to be far more expensive, forcing constant trade-offs in computer design between speed and cost. Solving this trade-off could make faster computing broadly accessible.