How 6 organizers are building effective global health solutions from the bottom up

Global development is wobbling — funding slipping, crises multiplying — and the most reliable force we have isn’t a new pledge or a distant plan. It’s people on the ground.

This story is part of the 2025 Future Perfect 25

Every year, the Future Perfect team curates the undersung activists, organizers, and thinkers who are making the world a better place. This year’s honorees are all keeping progress on global health and development alive. Read more about the project here, and check out the other categories:

Have ideas for who should be on next year’s list? Email us at futureperfect@vox.com.

These local organizers, nurses, food innovators, and environmental defenders are meeting growing need with competence and courage, turning urgency into practical service. They show how change scales from the street up: reshaping food markets to fight hunger, stitching together public health gaps, expanding mental health care, challenging period poverty, and forcing accountability on toxic polluters.

They know the bus routes, the backroads, the languages, the rumors — everything that never makes it into a grant proposal. They build trust one school lunch, one home visit, one community meeting at a time, and then turn that trust into durable systems. In a year of volatility, that reliability is development’s strongest asset. If we want outcomes, we have to back proximity — because the people closest to the problem are the ones already building the solution. —Bryan Walsh, senior editorial director

Jean Paul Gisa and Sarah LaHaye

Humanity faces two formidable, interconnected challenges this century: We need to grow lots more food to feed a growing world population and fill nutritional gaps for hundreds of millions of people who don’t have enough to eat. And we need to do it without torching the planet. Sarah LaHaye, formerly the director for sustainable food system innovations and partnerships at the nonprofit One Acre Fund, and Jean Paul Gisa, a current venture studio director at the same organization, have created a unique project with the potential to move the needle on both.

Based in Rwanda, where rates of meat consumption are among the lowest in the world, Gisa oversees a venture that uses locally grown beans to make an affordable, shelf-stable plant-based meat alternative. Known by the somewhat unfortunate name “textured vegetable protein,” TVP in reality is a delicious, chewy meatless staple that has been used all over the world for decades, incorporated into curries in India and national school lunches in South Africa. It’s typically made from soybeans, but LaHaye, who is based in Switzerland and spearheaded the project in 2021, sought out a partnership with scientists at Wageningen University in the Netherlands to develop a version of TVP made from a combination of soy and Rwandan legumes.

Now in its market testing stage under Gisa’s leadership, One Acre’s project is an elegant solution to multiple interlocking problems across sub-Saharan Africa, offering people who can’t afford meat a nutrient-rich plant-based version, and creating an incentive for local farmers to plant legumes, which are........

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