British lawyer Alexander McLean's fascination with issues of inequality began at a young age. At 9, he was reading about the Civil Rights movement and the death penalty, fascinated by the power of the law to inflict punishment as well as deal out justice. At 18, he traveled to Uganda to volunteer as a hospice worker, where he saw that while ...

Uganda is an eye-opening example of how displaced people can lift up a nation, say economics professor Paul Collier and refugee researcher Alexander Betts. Uganda hosts more than 500,000 refugees, making it the third-largest host country in Africa (after Ethiopia and Kenya). Its refugees come from a wide variety of unsettled neighboring countri...

In 2007, journalist Andrew Mwenda took the stage at TEDGlobal in Arusha, Tanzania, and decried the symptomatic disease affecting his home continent: aid. The surprising take certainly got the goat of some members of the audience, including U2 frontman Bono, who has devoted so much time to promoting the need for African aid and who spoke up from ...

Enjoy these fascinating reads from across the internet: A great profile on TED Fellow Sanga Moses, who quit his job as an accountant in Uganda and set out to develop an eco-friendly cooking fuel. Why? So that girls in his country -- for example, his young sister -- wouldn’t have to spend all their time collecting wood and could attend sc...

When former accountant Sanga Moses ran into his sister on a far-from-home road carrying firewood on what was supposed to be a school day, his life changed. He knew that Uganda's rapidly disappearing forests had big implications for the environment, but he hadn't recognized the day-to-day effect it was having on the lives of his family and vi...

Rose Shuman designed Question Box to spread the benefits of the Internet in the developing world. At the push of a button, villagers could get answers to any query -- from banana plant viruses to HIV/AIDS -- in their local language. Now Rose is building software to scale the model and track callers' question trends in real time. Int...

Helping prisoners get a legal education benefits them and the world, says African Prisons Project founder Alexander McLean: They can help their fellow inmates with their legal expertise, and when they’re released, they can help society, too. Seven young men sit around a table covered in textbooks. They are having an animated conversation in a r...

On September 21, gunmen attacked a shopping mall in Nairobi, killing at least 67 people, with many others still missing. We are extraordinarily saddened to hear that among the victims of this violence were TEDxKraków speaker Ross Langdon and his partner Elif Yavuz. Ross, an architect by trade, gave a beautiful talk at TEDxKraków 2012 abou...

Deborah Rhodes' spectacular collaboration with a nuclear physicist led to a breakthrough in breast cancer detection. Kate Orff introduces us to the new hero of ecology: the oyster. Amber Case is a "cyborg anthropologist" -- she studies the symbiotic relationship between humans and machines. The Ahn Trio: With cello, piano and violin, si...

Congratulations is in order for TED Fellow Jon Gosier. His mobile app, Abayima, has been awarded a $150,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge, which funds innovative projects designed to get information to all corners of the globe. While smartphones may be the norm in the West, most mobile phone users in the world -- about 4 billion of ...

For decades, the farmers of East Africa have battled the African whitefly, a tiny insect that infests the cassava crop. Cassava, also called manioc, arrowroot or tapioca, is an important food all over the world -- more than half a billion people (yes, billion with a b) rely on cassava for their daily meals. For East African farmers, a whitef...

What is a TEDx in a Box, you ask? It’s a suitcase stuffed with everything an economically marginalized community needs to host their very own TEDx event -- a projector, an iPod preloaded with subtitled TED Talks, a sound system, camcorders to capture fresh talks, and a how-to guide. TEDx in a Box was an idea that originated at TEDxKibera, a ...

From Bihar to the World Bank Sanjay Pradhan grew up in Bihar, India's poorest state. He came home one day, at 6 years old, to find a cart of sweets at the front door. He and his brothers greedily dug in -- but when his father came home, he was livid. Those sweets, it turns out, were a bribe from a contractor. His father built roads in Bih...

Meet the new class of TEDGlobal 2017 Fellows! Representing 18 countries -- including, for the first time in our program, Somalia, Uruguay, Liberia and Zimbabwe -- this class clears a high bar of talent, creativity and eccentricity. Among those selected, you'll find a Somali computer scientist catalyzing the tech scene in Somalia and Somalila...

The Klong Toey Community Lantern -- a community space in the oldest and largest of Bangkok’s slums -- was built very quickly. Not quite as quickly as shown in this three-minute timelapse video, but construction for the project took just three weeks thanks to the help of the community. But while construction went fast, Norwegian architects ...

Want to know what's going to happen next in the worlds of science, art, tech and more? Get to know the 2012 class of TEDGlobal Fellows and Senior Fellows in our downloadable guide (PDF). Some 55 TEDGlobal Fellows and Senior Fellows will attend TEDGlobal next week. As director Tom Rielly writes: Our Fellows truly embody this conference’...

Toby Eccles, whose talk about Social Impact Bonds was published yesterday, has been busy since he gave his talk at TEDGlobal in June. Eccles, founder of the nonprofit Social Finance, now spends about half his time on Development Impact Bonds, a spinoff of his original idea. Where SIBs seek private funders to invest in social causes, with pay...

Jane Chen knew that, for her low-cost baby incubator to save lives, moms would need to love it. But she had no idea that one of the world’s most famous moms—Beyoncé—would become one of her biggest supporters. Last week, Beyoncé announced a $125,000 donation to Embrace Innovations, Chen’s organization that makes the low-cost infant warmer,...

Last week, the editors of Time magazine published a list of 30 people under 30 who are changing the world, with the help of a panel of millennials. On the list: six teenagers and twenty-somethings with TED connections. We at TED have had youth on the brain recently. TED2013 was themed “The Young. The Wise. The Undiscovered.” and we’re sti...

"This is what happens when you take the addictive power of an LOLcat and apply it in a ceonsorship state," says An Xiao Mina, a writer, technologist and researcher who studies Chinese memes. On the TEDGlobal 2013 stage, she shares the moment that led her to this unusual specialty. Two years ago, China's government imposed a severe crackdo...

As a physician and epidemiologist, Gary Slutkin didn't think he had much to contribute to the conversation about gun violence in America. But then he began to realize something -- that outbreaks of violence follow the same patterns as outbreaks of tuberculosis, cholera and AIDS, all of which he'd worked on reversing during a decade in Somali...

To help journalists and emergency responders, Jon Gosier is developing SwiftRiver, a platform that sorts massive amounts of web and SMS data for accuracy. With his Ugandan innovation hub Appfrica standing on its own two feet, Jon has moved back to the US. Co-Founder of metaLayer, a company that adds visual data to real world scenarios, Jon conti...

Today, TED is thrilled to announce the 25 new members of 2012's TED Fellows class and 12 new Senior Fellows. A Lebanese open-source hardware inventor, a French computational architect and the founder of Skillshare.com are among 25 members of 2012's class of new TED Fellows. Twelve new Senior Fellows from seven countries, selected for two mor...

Want to do something to help the world’s more than 25 million refugees? Any business -- no matter its size -- can give them a boost, says Melissa Fleming, chief spokesperson for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. On Saturday, June 9, I had the honor of co-hosting the first-ever TEDx event held at a refugee camp -- it took place at Kenya’s Kakuma Cam...

The philosopher Immanuel Kant asserted, “Man is the only being who needs education.” But if he’d said "not the only being," he’d have been correct. Kittens who watch their mothers become better hunters faster than kittens who must figure out what claws and teeth are for. A lot of learning travels socially from parents to offspring or from elders...

Social violence in Guatemala, Mexican and Central American migrant communities in the United States, the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, children with cerebral malaria in Uganda -- for the past decade, photographer Jon Lowenstein has been documenting the often violent and traumatic daily lives of individuals and communities living at the ...

Getting treatment for a mental illness when you live in the developing world is hardly as easy as making an appointment with a therapist or psychiatrist. Mental illness is often not treated with the same sense of urgency as physical illness, and resources to provide care are simply not available in many areas. In this moving talk at TEDGl...

TED Fellow Lars Jan, the director of the multi-disciplinary art lab Early Morning Opera, is seeking everyday personal rituals from collaborators -- perhaps, you? -- for a work-in-progress called HOLOSCENES. This public-performance installation -- inspired by humanity's relationship with climate change and flooding -- will be made up of three...

One year ago, TED launched The Audacious Project — an initiative to help change-makers with big, bold ideas for tackling global challenges find the support to make their visions a reality. What's happened since has been amazing. Thousands of people in the US are awaiting trials at home rather than in jail cells now because of the work of The...

In this morning’s first session of short, sharp talks from the TED Fellows, an impressive lineup of world-changers share their ideas for seeing the world in new ways -- like an AI that might help us see cancer symptoms, or a fresh view on how refugees really live, or a long-term study that's detecting a social network for fish. The mornin...