World Solve

Informal foundries produce cheap cooking pots from scrap aluminum contaminated with high levels of lead and arsenic, which leach into daily meals.

Artisanal gold miners use liquid mercury to extract gold, discharging toxic heavy metals into river systems and causing severe neurological damage.

Workers use bare hands and open nitric acid to extract gold and copper from electronics, inhaling deadly fumes and contaminating urban drainage networks.

With finite budgets and staff, agencies inevitably choose which laws to prioritize enforcing, but this decision-making is often informal and opaque rather than publicly explained. This can lead to uneven, seemingly arbitrary enforcement.

Gig work can offer flexibility but often comes with unpredictable income swings that make financial planning difficult for workers. A system that offers more income stability without eliminating flexibility remains unresolved.

Migrant workers often pay steep fees to send money to family in their home countries, cutting into wages that are frequently already low. Cheaper remittance systems could meaningfully improve financial security for millions of families.

Artisanal mining, often for gold, frequently uses toxic mercury and lacks basic safety protections, harming both workers' health and nearby water systems. Making this widespread informal industry safer at scale remains an unresolved global challenge.

When automation replaces jobs, the resulting profits mostly go to business owners and shareholders, not the workers who lost their income. A fairer system for sharing these gains remains an unsolved economic and political question.

Informal waste pickers in Philippines recover a substantial share of recyclable material but operate without legal recognition, safety equipment, or fair pricing from recycling buyers.

Achieving affordable and scalable solutions for safe sanitation in dense urban informal settlements at meaningful scale demands simultaneous progress in fundamental research, engineering integration and socio-technical systems that work for low- and middle-income settings. Existing efforts remain fragmented relative to the magnitude of the challenge.

Long-term anxiety and depression tied to job insecurity and informal labor in Chile are poorly quantified, making it difficult for policymakers to justify investment in preventive mental health infrastructure.

The majority of informal-sector workers in Papua New Guinea have no access to pension savings mechanisms, leaving them financially vulnerable in old age.

Informal minibus and paratransit systems in Germany carry the majority of urban commuters but operate without route optimization, safety standards, or integration with formal transit planning.

Informal settlements in Yemen largely rely on pit latrines with no formal desludging service, leading to overflow into waterways and elevated diarrheal disease rates among children.

Rapid urban growth in Indonesia has produced large informal settlements lacking basic infrastructure, and in-place upgrading approaches remain rare compared to displacement-driven redevelopment models.

Create conservation and restoration approaches that protect biodiversity while sustaining the people whose food, income, and culture depend on those ecosystems. The challenge is especially acute in informal settlements, where existing solutions often assume stable institutions, high incomes, continuous connectivity, or centralized service delivery.

Develop practical data collection, modeling, public deliberation, and evaluation tools for decisions currently made with incomplete or inaccessible evidence. The challenge is especially acute in informal settlements, where existing solutions often assume stable institutions, high incomes, continuous connectivity, or centralized service delivery.

Create safe, economically viable collection, sorting, repair, reuse, and material-recovery systems suited to decentralized local markets. The challenge is especially acute in informal settlements, where existing solutions often assume stable institutions, high incomes, continuous connectivity, or centralized service delivery.

Develop enforceable, worker-centered protections for safety, pay, benefits, bargaining, and grievance resolution outside conventional employment. The challenge is especially acute in informal settlements, where existing solutions often assume stable institutions, high incomes, continuous connectivity, or centralized service delivery.

Build affordable monitoring and response systems that identify local environmental threats before they become chronic public-health crises. The challenge is especially acute in informal settlements, where existing solutions often assume stable institutions, high incomes, continuous connectivity, or centralized service delivery.