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:

ThinkersInnovatorsMovers and Shakers

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 excellent for soil health, a critical determinant of agricultural productivity.

The TVP, rather than being given away for free, will be sold at the price it costs to produce it — an approach that respects consumers’ autonomy by allowing them to choose whether or not they want it. At a time when many global institutions urge more animal product consumption to meet nutritional needs in poor countries, One Acre Fund’s model is testing whether a bean-based alternative protein can do so more affordably, and with a far smaller environmental footprint than meat. —Marina Bolotnikova, deputy editor

Hakeem Jimo

The future of the global meat industry will be decided, in large part, by what happens in low-income countries — particularly in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The two regions currently eat fewer animal products than virtually anywhere on earth, but are projected to eat a lot more meat and dairy in the decades ahead as populations grow and incomes rise.

If entrepreneur and activist Hakeem Jimo has his way, a lot of that growth in meat production will be plant-based meat, which has a much lighter environmental footprint — and requires far fewer precious resources, like freshwater and land — than animal meat.

For over a decade, Jimo has been steadily building the plant-based food sector in Africa’s most populous country: Nigeria.

In 2013, Jimo and his partner founded Veggie Victory — Lagos’s first vegan restaurant. A few years later, they expanded the business to include a plant-based retail product — VChunks — which is made with seitan, an ancient meat-like protein made from wheat. Jimo says it has a chewy texture, which is perfect for the stews commonly eaten in Nigeria, and it can also be speared through skewers or eaten with traditional jollof rice, among many other dishes.

Beyond business, Jimo is also shaping food policy, as the first Nigerian country director of ProVeg — an international nonprofit that advocates for plant-rich diets — by working with hospitals and schools to expand plant-based meal offerings.

He sees his work not just as a way to mitigate the climate impact of food production, but also to more sustainably meet Africa’s growing protein demand. “We only consume half of [the amount of protein that] Asians are consuming, and a fraction of what Americans are eating,” Jimo told AgFunder News*.* “We need to fix the protein deficiency, and we believe it cannot be done with animal protein only.” —Kenny Torrella, senior reporter

Hauwa Ojeifo

“Nothing about us without us” is a motto that Nigerian mental health and disability rights activist Hauwa Ojeifo has taken to heart.

In 2015, Ojeifo was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and later attempted suicide. But instead of receiving support, she says she faced significant stigma and challenges while navigating the troubled Nigerian mental health care system. Nigeria has one of the highest mental health burdens in Africa, and the country has a severe shortage of mental health professionals. By some estimates, Nigeria has only 250 psychiatrists for a population of more than 232 million people.

Ojeifo’s experience inspired her to create She Writes Woman, a disability rights and advocacy organization that works to change conversations about mental health in West Africa and provides a 24/7 helpline and free tele-therapy services to Nigerians.

“Keeping quiet was literally a life-or-death situation,” Ojeifo told Time Magazine in 2024. “And so I started to talk.”

Dubbed “the voice of mental health” in Nigeria, Ojeifo is on a mission to expand access and eliminate taboos. In 2020, she became the first person vocal about her own mental health condition to testify before the Nigerian National Assembly about the rights of people with psychological disorders.

Ojeifo has also been outspoken about surviving abuse and sexual violence, and is a powerful advocate for underserved women. Last year, she was one of 12 leaders who received a $20 million grant from Melinda French Gates. She used the money to launch the Hauwa Ojeifo Scholarship, which will fund projects aimed at improving women’s health.

“Women and girls in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East face disproportionate health challenges and systemic barriers to access the care they need, particularly when it comes to psychosocial support and disability inclusion,” Ojeifo told Candid, a philanthropy news digest, in June. “With this scholarship, I want everyone to see that people like me with mental health conditions and disabilities can lead and champion causes dear to them. Ultimately, I’m trying to get people with disabilities into all decision-making rooms, and this is just the beginning.” —Shayna Korol, Future Perfect fellow

Khyati Gupta

When Khyati Gupta was a teenager, she noticed a bloodstain on a young girl’s dress. Gupta learned that the girl, the daughter of someone who worked in her household, had never used menstrual products while on her period, relying instead on discarded pieces of cloth, because her family could not afford them.

Distraught and eager to help, Gupta used her pocket money to buy period products for the girl and began a campaign to inspire people to donate menstrual supplies to at least one girl in need. She learned that the issue of period poverty — a lack of access to menstrual products and clean toilets to manage menstrual health and hygiene effectively — ran much deeper. According to the World Bank, some 500 million people around the world lack proper access.

Khyati’s observation inspired her to start, with the help of her father, Arun Gupta, the Delhi-based Pinkishe Foundation in 2017, just before she turned 17. The father-and-daughter team began a movement to tackle period poverty in India, which is home to more than 20 percent of all menstruating adolescents in the world. And, because menstruation is considered a taboo subject in India, about 71 percent of preteen and teenage girls know nothing about periods before they menstruate for the first time.

Period poverty is an under-recognized cause of missing school and work, both in India and abroad. One study found that each month, one in four Indian girls miss school because of their period, and every year 23 percent drop out altogether after they start menstruating. Only 36 percent of Indian people who menstruate use pads, with the rest relying on cloths and rags to manage their periods. They face increased risks of urinary tract infections and bacterial vaginosis, with more than 70 percent of reproductive issues in India stemming from inadequate menstrual hygiene.

Since Khyati co-founded the Pinkishe Foundation, the organization has distributed more than 5 million pads and provided menstrual education to more than 200,000 Indian girls through its school outreach programs. Pinkishe also provides economic opportunities for rural women to create eco-friendly pads.

Khyati envisions a world in which no one is deprived of the tools or education they need to get through their periods. “Our organization has always been about one thing: Menstrual health matters. Not just in cities, but in every rural corner, every underserved community where this conversation is still a taboo,” Khyati wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Menstrual health is not a luxury — it’s a necessity.” —Shayna Korol, Future Perfect fellow

Phyllis Omido

Phyllis Omido didn’t set out to be an environmental folk hero.

In 2007, she was a young mom with a new job at a factory that melted down old car batteries near Mombasa, Kenya — until her baby got extremely ill. Doctors found acute lead poisoning in her baby that was likely passed through her breast milk. That’s the moment Omido decided to walk out of her job. She began organizing with neighbors who’d been breathing the same invisible toxin, and then created the Center for Justice, Governance, and Environmental Action.

Omido’s son lived. And her activism has likely helped redirect the fates of many young children in her country. She helped organize blood and soil tests that documented the dangerous levels of lead in her community, which then fueled street protests and even an arrest for “inciting violence” in 2012. But Omido’s steadfast determination paid off in 2014, when the polluting plant in Owino Uhuru, on the outskirts of Mombasa, was shut down — proof that a small community can make a big difference.

Omido has since pushed the fight further, taking it to the courts. In 2020, a Kenyan court ordered offenders to pay compensation for injuries and deaths, and set aside money to restore the environment around Owino Uhuru, the community where Omido lives. It’s one of the clearest legal acknowledgments in Kenya that pollution is a public health harm. Kenyan environmental regulators and other authorities pushed back and challenged the decision, slowing down accountability. But in 2024, the Supreme Court of Kenya upheld the earlier ruling, affirming liability, and reinstated a 700 million shilling (around $5 million) cleanup fund.

“We hope our case will be something that every environmental defender in the world can refer to when they raise issues of accountability,” she said in an interview with The Guardian. —Pratik Pawar, Future Perfect fellow

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