Category: Wellbeing

It’s a building project with towering ambitions—to use all 17 of the UN’s Global Goals as a sustainability blueprint for a 35,000-square-metre eco-village being built on the southern outskirts of Copenhagen.

Amid dire warnings about the need to rapidly rein in carbon dioxide emissions, Danish architects Lendager Group, and project partners Årstiderne Arkitekter, want their 400-home development in Ørestad South to set a new standard for sustainable construction.

“We see the Sustainable Development Goals as a global tool with a holistic approach to the world’s sustainability challenges. A tool and a language that can be understood across sectors and countries,” Lendager says in its project description for the UN17 Village development.

Source UN Environment

Smile Together CIC is to open a dental centre designed and adapted for patients with special needs, having secured £1m in investment from Big Issue Invest (BII).

The new site, in Cornwall, will open by the summer.

Resonance, which helps organisations to become investment ready and to raise funding, advised Smile Together on the investment.

Smile Together – formed in 2016, and shortlisted in last year’s UK Social Enterprise Awards – secured the investment from BII in late 2018, in the form of an unsecured eight-year fixed interest loan, with capital repayments not starting until year four.

The investment will finance the refurbishment of a former grammar school, which the community interest company (CIC) has purchased itself, into a purpose-built dental centre designed and adapted for patients with special needs, including mental health conditions and autism. The new site will increase local access to competitively-priced and fully accessible dental services, and will see children for free.

“This street sign is crooked,” notes Henny Koot, then stoops down to straighten it.

We are in Spoorwijk, a neighbourhood in The Hague. “Spoorwijk is a very special neighbourhood. It’s a green space where children can play safely in the playgrounds, where entrepreneurs from different cultures have set up shop. People care about each other,” explains Koot, who chairs a local community organisation. Spoorwijk may be a caring neighbourhood, but it’s part of Laak, The Hague’s smallest district – as well as one of its poorest and most diverse. The average annual income of its 4,340 residents is €16,300 (£14,225) – about €1,350 (£1,180) a month. In 2017, 67.3% of the inhabitants of Spoorwijk were of non-Dutch background – the majority from Surinam, but also from Turkey and Morocco.

Drones carrying precious vaccines will soon be taking to the skies over Vanuatu, in a world-first trial that has the potential to revolutionise healthcare for isolated islanders in the Pacific.

The Vanuatuan government has signed contracts with two commercial drone companies and asked them to deliver temperature-sensitive vaccines to 39 remote villages that health workers often take days to access by car, boat or on foot.

Unicef has been instrumental in setting up the trial and said the drone technology had “massive” potential in the Pacific and around the globe.

Innovate UK has awarded more than three-quarters of a million pounds toward the development of an artificial intelligence platform that could improve care for people with mobility issues.

A consortium led by Cambridge Bio-Augmentation Systems (CBAS) is developing a machine learning system that analyses the daily movements of patients with orthoses and those at risk of falls.

Mandlakazi’s journey only started when he realised that his aunt, who is hard of hearing, was in danger.

Even though his aunt can lip-read, he became worried about her safety in highly congested or noisy areas.

As his aunt can’t hear alarms or other potentially life-saving sounds, he thought of a solution to help her and others in a similar situation.

Mandlakazi founded Senso, a startup SME, and created a wrist armband to help people with hearing impediments react to life-threatening situations in time.

“It was my first night as an intern and three children died before my eyes. I felt so helpless that I cried.”

In 1996, Dr Mohammod Jobayer Chisti was working in the paediatric department of the Sylhet Medical College Hospital in Bangladesh. That evening he made a promise that he would do something to stop children dying from pneumonia.

About 920,000 babies and small children die from the disease each year, mostly in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

After two decades of research, Dr Chisti has now come up with a low-cost device with the potential to save thousands of babies’ lives.