In a year marked by devastating cuts to aid and horrible humanitarian crises, global health and development progress is at risk of backsliding. But then, there are those who refuse to cave in.

Tackling global health from new perspectives, these leaders have channeled their expertise to create lasting impact. Their work spans high-stakes arenas, from pioneering massive new commitments to women’s health to preventing biodefense failures. Others have steered national health system transformations — including making cancer treatment free for all. Then, there are those who are rebuilding war-torn nations, when attention has been diverted elsewhere.

They are united by a deep-seated, strategic commitment to addressing child mortality and poverty and by their determination to make progress in the face of a perpetually challenging world. — Izzie Ramirez, deputy editor

Ms. Rachel 

If you’re a parent, teacher, or cool aunt, you’ve probably heard of Ms. Rachel. She’s every toddler’s favorite YouTuber. 

Informed by her (two!) master’s degrees in music and early childhood education, Rachel Accurso started making singalong videos for her son back in 2019. He had a speech delay, and Accurso knew there was a gap in useful but fun content for kids like her son. Her finger was on the pulse. Her channel, originally named Songs for Littles, transformed into a global phenomenon. Some 13 billion views later, the Ms. Rachel cinematic universe now encompasses books, a fast-selling toy line, and a top-rated Netflix series.

It could have been easy for Accurso to focus only on making positive videos — the ones that toddlers can’t stop dancing along to. She didn’t. On her other social media platforms, Accurso has a direct line to caregivers and adults — and she uses it to advocate for the most disadvantaged. 

Accurso has consistently used her immense platform to champion causes often avoided by public figures, speaking openly about her personal struggle with postpartum depression and brushing off conservative backlash for posting a Pride Month message last year. 

Perhaps none is more moving than her unwavering commitment lately to kids in Gaza, where the malnutrition crisis — caused by Israel’s brutal military campaign and continued reluctance to allow consistent aid into the enclave — has now reached “catastrophic” levels, according to UNICEF. There, more than 320,000 children are at risk of acute malnutrition. 

“Please look at her eyes for one minute,” she said in one video earlier this year, pointing to a picture of an incredibly malnourished baby, Siwar Ashour, whose haunting stare became emblematic of the crisis in Gaza. She also featured Rahaf, a three-year-old double amputee, and sang with her on one of her videos. Critics accused her of not “caring for all kids” after she raised more than $50,000 for Save the Children’s Emergency Fund for kids in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine, among others. But she refused to relent. 

“I have to just remind myself that kids’ lives are more important than my reputation,” she told Glamour’s Samantha Barry last month. 

She’s right. We cannot have a better, healthier future without considering the well-being of children. Food, water, shelter, education, and access to medical care are all basic needs that are crucial for human development, especially in those first few years of life. Accurso forces us to extend that urgency to every child. 

“As an educator, you care about every child in your class,” she told Mohammed R. Mhawish, a journalist who escaped Gaza with his son, in June. “I’ve taught children from so many places and so many backgrounds. They all want to play, to learn, to laugh, and to belong. They are all innocent and precious. And geography does not change that.”

Anita Zaidi

It has not been an easy year for women and girls around the world. Cuts to global aid threaten to unravel decades of progress in getting girls to school, keeping mothers safe, and bringing women into positions of power.

But there is one reminder that helps Anita Zaidi, head of the Gates Foundation’s gender equality division, maintain what she calls relentless optimism: We’ve come so far. 

“I get a lot of energy from looking at how much women have achieved over the last 100 years,” she told me last year. “Who would have thought that we would have gotten to where we are now?”

Zaidi, who is based in Seattle, is a pediatrician by training. She began her career fighting early child mortality in a small fishing village in Pakistan, her home country, eventually winning a $1 million prize to address malnutrition, improve vaccine and primary health care access, and train midwives and community health workers.

Over the past few decades, Zaidi has pioneered highly successful interventions that take seriously the idea that poverty, at its core, is sexist, and solving global health issues means taking into account entrenched gender dynamics and the role of women from the start.

Now, she has a lot more money to make that happen. In August, the Gates Foundation announced a new $2.5 billion commitment for research and development to improve women’s health around the world. We’re talking high-tech portable ultrasound devices, contraceptive patches that could be a game-changer for family planning, and simple postpartum hemorrhage drapes that can make giving birth much safer. 

In other words, Zaidi still has plenty to be optimistic about. Investing in women’s health is “not just the right thing to do,” she told PBS, but “a tremendous opportunity for coming up with new solutions in a very exciting area of science.” —Sara Herschander, Future Perfect fellow

Caitlin Tulloch  

After the White House began dismantling the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) early this year, it would have been easy for Caitlin Tulloch to throw up her hands in despair. Instead, the California-based economist did a very economist-y thing: She went to ForeignAssistance.gov and downloaded a spreadsheet.

This spreadsheet was a master list of all the 22,000-plus programs that USAID was funding. Tulloch realized that by filtering these programs to find the most cost-effective ones, she could direct interested donors to focus on funding them, thereby saving as many lives as possible. 

She and her colleagues created Project Resource Optimization (PRO) to do exactly that. Soon, they’d narrowed it down to a few dozen programs — offering malnutrition treatment, safe water access, and more — that they labeled “urgent and vetted.”  

In September, PRO announced, “More than $110 million has been mobilized, ensuring continued delivery of life-saving aid to an estimated 41 million people across more than 30 countries…Given the way these programs are targeted, a large proportion of those reached will be children under the age of five.”

What Tulloch did reminds me of a Leonard Cohen song — the one that urges us, “Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering.” We can’t perfectly fix every problem in the world. But we can still make the world a better place for some. At a time when many Americans were just struck dumb, Tulloch rang the bells that still can ring. — Sigal Samuel, senior reporter

Elizabeth (Beth) Cameron

In August, biosecurity expert Beth Cameron co-authored a piece for The Atlantic called “No One in the White House Knows How to Stop Ebola.” She’s right. And there is currently still no one in the White House focused on biodefense. 

This is a tremendous problem because biological threats don’t wait for a change of administration. We need competent people constantly playing defense. 

Cameron would know. She’s spent decades in and out of government playing a pivotal role in global health security efforts. She established and led the National Security Council’s biosecurity office after the 2014 Ebola epidemic. Trump terminated it in his first term, but Cameron reestablished and led it under the Biden administration. She helped oversee the US global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Her work was pivotal to launching the Global Health Security Agenda, a public-private partnership to defend against biological threats, as well as numerous other biosecurity initiatives. She served as the global health security consultant for the dearly departed USAID. 

She also founded NTI | bio, an influential arm of the Nuclear Threat Initiative think tank focused on biosecurity (and, disclosure: my former employer, although unfortunately we didn’t overlap). 

Her current work as the senior advisor at the Brown University Pandemic Center is charting the course for a safer future as governments are backing down from their responsibilities on the health security front. She knows that it takes moments to destroy what it takes years to build — funding cuts have decimated America’s biosecurity infrastructure — but she’s not giving up. She’s got a mind for strategy, extensive experience, and a deep commitment to protecting the world from biological risks. 

“When you’re in the middle of a crisis and you have to ask for money, you’re already too late,” Cameron told 80,000 Hours, a career guidance nonprofit, in a 2017 podcast interview on pandemic preparedness. “Countries really need to be able to quickly detect and stop outbreaks at the source before they become epidemics. … we really need to be much better prepared to respond in real time than we were during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.”  — Shayna Korol, Future Perfect fellow

Raed Al-Saleh

Raed al-Saleh has spent over a decade rescuing Syrians from the rubble in the aftermath of brutal bombings.

A co-founder of the famed White Helmets — a search and rescue organization that formed as a grassroots volunteer-led response to the Syrian civil war — al-Saleh stood before the United Nations pleading for that work to end last December. He slammed the international community for having “utterly failed” Syrians after nearly 14 years of war. “I truly dream that our work of pulling bodies from under the rubble will not continue,” he told AFP.

Just four days later, Syrian rebels overtook Damascus and the Assad regime collapsed, ending over half a century of brutal rule. But al-Saleh’s work of pulling people from rubble, which earned the White Helmets global acclaim, three Nobel Peace Prize nominations, and an Academy Award-winning short film, shows no sign of stopping. 

As of March, al-Saleh is no longer head of the White Helmets, which dug over 100,000 Syrians out of the rubble and provided a range of other emergency services over the course of 11 years. He is now minister of environment, emergencies, and disaster management in a new Syrian government charged with rebuilding a nation ravaged by war.

As part of his new role, al-Saleh is tasked with battling wildfires, clearing land mines, and repairing roads across the country, and his over 3,000 now salaried White Helmets have been formally absorbed into the country’s emergency response force. The transition won’t be easy. According to NPR, Al-Saleh now oversees a firefighting force in which White Helmets and Assad-era first responders slide down separate poles of the firehouse into the same fire truck, responding to emergencies side by side. 

But it’s been over a decade since al-Saleh left his pre-war job as an electronics salesman to help build the White Helmets from the ground up. And he has no plans to go back to his day job anytime soon. —Sara Herschander, Future Perfect fellow

Sabin Nsanzimana

Inside a tin mine in Rwanda, a fruit bat infected a worker with the deadly Marburg virus in September 2024. It was the country’s first case of the highly contagious virus, a relative of Ebola, and initially, global health officials feared for the worst.

But by December, something remarkable had happened. In just three months, Rwandan health officials — led by Sabin Nsanzimana, the country’s minister of health — made one of the largest Marburg outbreaks ever disappear. 

How? Over the past three decades, Rwanda, a country once ravaged by genocide, has managed to pull off a wholesale transformation of its health care system. After years spent prioritizing health spending, and after building over 1,000 new health posts and a community-based insurance program, almost every Rwandan now has health coverage. Life expectancy has shot up by 26 years. Child mortality has plunged by nearly 78 percent since the turn of the century. It used to take most rural Rwandans more than an hour to reach the nearest health facility on foot, but thanks to a surge in new locations, most can now get the help they need in less than 30 minutes.

The country has also become a model in global cancer care, and just this summer, Rwanda’s community-based health insurance program began making cancer treatments free.  

So by the time the Marburg virus broke out, Rwanda was ready. It took Nsanzimana just 10 days to roll out an emergency vaccine trial for the virus. The country mounted a contact-tracing and surveillance response so quickly that doctors have wondered what could’ve been different had the world responded to Covid-19 with the same urgency.

The threat of the Marburg virus has passed, but Nsanzimana says the country’s health care revolution is far from over. Next on his list is eradicating cervical cancer by 2027, dramatically expanding the medical workforce, and achieving universal health insurance coverage by 2030. 

And if he could beat Marburg in three months, he might just be able to pull it off.  —Sara Herschander, Future Perfect fellow

The grand challenges of global health and development, from feeding a warming world to defeating antibiotic resistance, require funding and effort and politics. But they also require breakthroughs.

In the last hundred years, we’ve made incredible progress fighting malaria, invented game-changing vaccines, and developed new drugs that could change the course on heart disease. But that doesn’t mean we should be satisfied. There’s still plenty of work to be done, and it’s all the more important in light of the worldwide retreat of foreign aid.

This year’s class of innovators are the scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs who understand that real progress demands radical new tools. They’re engineering microbes to clean up pollution, resurrecting ancient antibiotics with the help of AI, and building entirely new platforms for vaccine production in the Global South. 

Their work is a vibrant proof point: the future of human well-being, the fight against pandemic threats, and the resilience of our food supply all depend on the creative, sometimes audacious, power of innovation. —Izzie Ramirez, deputy editor

César de la Fuente 

Every 15 minutes, one person in the US dies because of an infection that antibiotics can no longer treat effectively. If you ever get an antibiotic-resistant infection, it could be César de la Fuente’s research that ends up saving your life.

De la Fuente heads a lab at the University of Pennsylvania called the Machine Biology Group, which is helping to pioneer the field of AI-based antibiotic discovery. His team developed the first computer-designed antibiotic with proven efficacy in preclinical animal models. 

You can thank this team for launching us into the brave new world of “molecular de-extinction”: In 2023, they resurrected molecules with antibiotic properties found in extinct organisms — Neanderthals. After training an AI model to make predictions about which molecules might make effective antibiotics for our modern age, they created those molecules in the lab and tested them in infected mice, with promising results.

Emboldened by this success, de la Fuente asked: “Why not just mine every extinct organism known to science?” To do that, the team developed a more powerful AI model called APEX, which they unveiled earlier this year. Already, it’s allowed them to identify new molecules in everything from ancient penguins to magnolia trees that had long since disappeared. 

This work is very cool — and very urgent. By 2050, 10 million people could die each year from diseases that have grown resistant to drugs. Yet Big Pharma lacks the financial incentive to create new antibiotics. That makes the creative research of scientists like de la Fuente incredibly valuable. —Sigal Samuel, senior reporter

Esther Wanjiru Kimani 

On a sun-baked morning in central Kenya, a small solar-powered device blinks to life beside a row of bean plants. It scans the leaves with a tiny camera, searching for the first signs of disease — the faint spots that might spell disaster for a farmer’s season. The machine was built by Esther Wanjiru Kimani, a computer scientist who believes technology’s most meaningful frontier isn’t in Silicon Valley. It’s in the fields where food begins.

Kimani grew up in Tigoni, a rural and mountainous village in Kenya, watching her parents battle unpredictable harvests. Each year, pests and blights crept through their crops faster than they could react. Years later, after she earned a degree in computer science from the University of Eldoret, northwest of Nairobi, she founded Farmer Lifeline Technologies, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to help smallholder farmers detect pests and diseases before they spread.

Her device, affordable and solar-powered, takes images of crops and then analyzes them in real time with machine-learning models. If the scan detects something amiss, it sends early-warning texts to farmers’ phones. 

It’s a simple system, but it could have profound implications in her home country and beyond: fewer chemical sprays, healthier yields, and more resilient livelihoods. In field trials, farmers using her technology have reduced crop losses by up to 30 percent and seen yield gains of roughly 40 percent — a game-changer in regions where even small fluctuations can decide whether a family has enough money to survive. 

Kimani’s work has earned global attention. In 2024, she won the Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation, becoming one of the few women — and one of the youngest — to ever receive the honor. I find her so inspiring because what her work embodies feels both humble and radical — and breaks the form of what you’d normally hear in the AI startup space. 

Her technology is an act of care. —Paige Vega, senior climate and Future Perfect editor 

Gagandeep Kang

Few scientists have done more to turn India’s vaccine ambition into a working system than Gagandeep Kang. 

Kang is known for her critical role in advancing vaccines such as the one against rotavirus, a gut virus responsible for deadly bouts of diarrhea in young children. But Kang’s impact runs deeper than any single shot: She helped build the evidence, trial capacity, and translational systems that move vaccines in India from lab bench to bedside.

Kang began her career in the late 1980s as a microbiologist at the Christian Medical College in India, tracking the gut viruses that were hospitalizing hundreds of thousands of children and killing over 100,000 a year. Her early work on diarrheal diseases and rotavirus laid the groundwork for India’s vaccine research, then still in its infancy. In 2018, the World Health Organization approved Rotovac for global use — the first Indian-developed vaccine to meet international quality standards. A year later, India rolled it out nationwide, marking a turning point against one of its deadliest childhood infections. Today, Rotavac is used in several countries, including Ghana and Palestine, where it’s part of national immunization programs.

Kang has advised governments and the WHO, pushed for stronger ethics boards and transparent data, and led India’s Translational Health Science and Technology Institute to build clinical trial capacity from the ground up. In short, she brought order and rigor to India’s clinical research. During the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, she became India’s clearest public voice on tackling misinformation — she was measured, data-driven, and unwilling to trade science for politics.

In early January 2021, when India’s regulator approved the home-grown Covid-19 shot Covaxin before publishing results from its final round of testing, Kang publicly warned against the move: “Essentially, you are handing people who are anti-vaccine, anti-science, a weapon that they can use,” she told the Times of India.

Now at the Gates Foundation, Kang oversees global work on enteric infections, diagnostics, and genomics — the unsexy, but critical, plumbing in public health. Kang has spent her career proving that trust and transparency are as vital to public health as the vaccines themselves. —Pratik Pawar, Future Perfect fellow

Geoffrey Otim

Synthetic biology is a field that redesigns life itself — engineering organisms to have new abilities. Already, we can harness microbes to clean up the environment or create sustainable fuels, and it’s only just the beginning.

The field has exploded in the past few decades around the world, but it’s been slower to catch on in Africa. Geoffrey Otim wants to change that.

Otim is the founder and CEO of SynBio Africa, a forum for advancing synthetic biology on the continent. Otim has extensive health security experience and spent more than eight years at a polio and measles laboratory in Uganda, working on outbreak response. 

He also consults for the UN while completing his doctoral work at the University of Queensland, which focuses on producing sustainable aviation fuel from genetically engineered microbial strains.

This offers tremendous promise, especially for Africa. The continent has and continues to endure extensive resource extraction, leading to African countries relying heavily on raw exports, which are commonly controlled by international companies and largely fail to translate to wealth for Africa’s people. Synthetic biology offers the potential to change the game.

In 2018, Otim founded East Africa’s first International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) team. iGEM is an international organization that aims to foster talent and hosts the world’s largest synthetic biology competition. “We are determined to use synthetic biology to create both a better Africa and a better world,” Otim’s iGEM team said in a statement. 

Three years later, Otim spearheaded the first synthetic biology conference on the continent. He’s a strong advocate for using synthetic biology to create sustainable biofuels and potentially revolutionize the African economy, generate clean energy, and greatly improve health outcomes for all of humanity. —Shayna Korol, Future Perfect fellow

Soham Sankaran

Soham Sankaran calls himself a “lapsed computer science researcher.” He left Cornell’s PhD program in robotics during the first year of the pandemic and took a sharp turn into — of all things — biology. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he watched India’s brutal Delta wave and ensuing vaccine shortages, and he decided that if no one in India was going to build cutting-edge vaccine tech, he would.

In late 2021, he founded PopVax, an mRNA vaccine startup in Hyderabad, a major city in southern India.

PopVax is trying to build broadly protective vaccines — shots that can protect against whole families of viruses, not just one strain at a time. To do that, Sankaran’s team uses computer models to predict which parts of a virus are least likely to change, and design mRNA vaccines that train the immune system to target those stable pieces. They’re also building the tools and capacity to make these kinds of vaccines, eventually at scale.

And the work is starting to get noticed. The National Institutes of Health will test PopVax’s next-gen Covid-19 booster in US clinical trials this year. The Gates Foundation is funding the team’s push to make mRNA vaccines that stay stable in an ordinary drive, and BARDA — the US government’s biomedical R&D agency — awarded PopVax $2 million in January 2025 to develop a needle-free patch for an mRNA flu vaccine that could be self-applied like a Band-Aid.

Sankaran’s pitch for this work is as moral as it is technical. He’s driven by the memory of AIDS-era drug inequity — when lifesaving HIV medicines were locked behind Western patents — and the belief that a life in Lagos or Lucknow should count the same as one in Los Angeles. “Unless we control intellectual property…we will continue to be treated as second class,” he said in a podcast appearance on Bretton Goods, “so, we have to do the research ourselves.”

With PopVax, he is trying to make that vision real — proving that smarter vaccine designs, faster platforms, and local capacity that can turn pandemic response from charity into competence, and more importantly, move lifesaving vaccines from the margins to the mainstream in the Global South. —Pratik Pawar, Future Perfect fellow

Maxwell Scott 

Screwworms — gnarly flesh-eating parasites with a notorious reputation — are back at the US’s doorstep. Last month, Mexico confirmed a case in the northern border state of Nuevo León, less than 70 miles from Texas, and both countries are scrambling to hold the line.

It’s a familiar crisis for Maxwell Scott, the molecular geneticist at North Carolina State University who’s devoted much of his career to outsmarting the screwworm.

The US first beat these pests in the 1950s and ’60s using something called the sterile insect technique: The US Department of Agriculture would flood the landscape with sterilized males so wild females mate with them and lay eggs that never hatch. That strategy worked so well that, by the 1990s, screwworms were eliminated from the US and Mexico and pushed back to a narrow barrier in Panama’s Darién Gap. Today, Panama still maintains that sterile-fly barrier, a decades-long living fence keeping these pests from creeping north again.

Scott was so inspired by that success that he has been quietly reinventing it for the 21st century.

In his lab, Scott built a male-only screwworm line so control programs can release just males. This way there are no stray females, and every released fly competes for mates in the wild. It’s “a green technology,” he told me in a recent interview, “because it’s the pest itself that’s the control agent.” One of his engineered strains of the insect has even been field tested in Panama to measure how far the males flew and how long they lasted.

He’s also pushing the idea further with CRISPR, a gene-editing tool that can rewrite DNA with surgical precision. Instead of sterilizing males and releasing them over and over again — an expensive routine that never fully keeps the flies from rebounding — these CRISPR-edited flies carry a genetic tweak that breaks the fertility gene in some of their offspring, making them unable to reproduce and thinning the population from within.

It’s a fix that could reshape how we control screwworms. But for now, Scott says, it’s grounded more by politics than by science. “In the United States, we may never move away from [traditionally] sterilized males,” partly because of public wariness about genetic engineering. But in places like South America, where screwworms remain a scourge, these tools might find a warmer welcome, he says.

Scott’s work sits at the uneasy frontier of climate, genetics, and food security — exactly the kind of science we’ll need more of as a warming world helps parasites push farther and faster. —Pratik Pawar, Future Perfect fellow

Yibo Li

In the paddies of China’s Yangtze River basin, the future of rice may hinge on a single gene.

Yibo Li, a plant geneticist at Huazhong Agricultural University, has helped uncover a temperature-sensitive gene in rice that threatens yields and grain quality as global temperatures rise. And now, he’s found a way to essentially turn it off.

Li and his team tested more than 530 rice varieties across four locations where nighttime temperatures have increased, searching for strains that could withstand heat. By examining which grains became chalky and which stayed translucent, they tracked the genetic markers responsible for the plant’s response. Their work, published earlier this year in the journal Cell, showed that modifying the gene or breeding naturally heat-resistant variants produced rice that retained both yield and quality under hot conditions.

This “reflects real-world environments, making the identified resistance genes more authentic and readily applicable to breeding programs,” Li told the Washington Post. In practical terms, the modified rice maintained its yield while unmodified crops produced up to 58 percent less grain — a dramatic difference with enormous implications for global food security. More than half of the world’s population relies on rice as a primary food staple.

Li’s vision extends beyond rice. He sees his findings as a possible template for tackling the climate challenge in other staple crops, like wheat, aiming to break the traditional trade-off between yield and quality. “Ultimately, we aim to develop innovative breeding strategies for high-yield, superior-quality crops,” he said. In a world where every extra degree of warmth can devastate harvests, Yibo Li’s work could be revolutionary for global food security. —Paige Vega, senior climate and Future Perfect editor

The roots of the world’s most stubborn global health problems don’t yield to vibes-based solutions. They surrender to data, rigor, and the surprisingly radical idea of actually trying to figure out what works. 

Governments and nonprofit organizations depend on the economists, activists, policymakers, and writers who are reshaping how we understand poverty, health, and progress. They’re the ones making sure that every dollar saves the maximum number of lives, that foreign aid is steered by evidence instead of dogma.

They’re also the ones who are open to trying something new, such as giving the simplest solutions — like a plate of beans or a clear-eyed approach to masculinity — the platform they deserve. Because when it comes to making the world better, good intentions are just the starting line. — Izzie Ramirez, deputy editor

Dean Karlan

When the Trump administration sicced its newly minted “Department of Government Efficiency” on the US Agency for International Development earlier this year, for just a moment, Dean Karlan offered to help.

After all, as USAID’s first chief economist, Karlan’s life’s work revolved around efficiency. His job was to help the agency stretch its dollars more effectively, save more lives, and propel US goals around the world. He has preached against waste, fraud, and abuse for longer than some of the DOGE bros have been alive. 

“I’m not a political appointee,” he told me earlier this year. “I’m just a dorky wonk who was on detail and who cares about the evidence of impact.” 

But it quickly became clear to Karlan that DOGE’s wrecking crew couldn’t care less about evaluating programs or prioritizing cost-effectiveness. His overtures to help went unanswered. Eventually, as he watched Elon Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio take a sledgehammer to relatively cheap, lifesaving initiatives like PEPFAR, as longstanding colleagues were sacked, and the agency denigrated as a “ball of worms” and a “criminal organization” that needs “to die,” Karlan did the only honorable thing left to do: He quit. 

And, like thousands of other morally indignant ex-USAID employees, he can’t stop talking about what’s been left behind. While Karlan is the first to say the status quo wasn’t perfect, the Trump administration’s dismantling of the agency has been absolutely catastrophic for vulnerable people around the world.

Karlan, who’s also a professor of economics and finance at Northwestern University, has kept busy since quitting USAID. He is the founder of Innovations for Poverty Action, a nonprofit studying solutions to global poverty, and ImpactMatters, a nonprofit that rates charities and was later acquired by Charity Navigator. He has spoken far and wide about what the future may hold, and he is currently working on a bipartisan plan to restore a semblance of American foreign aid the morning after the Trump era comes to a close.

Karlan is still hopeful that the US can one day rebuild the architecture behind its global aid strategy. And when that time comes, he’ll be ready to talk efficiency — with anyone who actually wants to listen. —Sara Herschander, Future Perfect fellow

Gary Barker

Concerns around the modern “masculinity crisis” — a catch-all term for worsening mental health among boys and men — has reached a fever pitch in recent years. And for good reason: Male suicide rates have been on the rise, men are working less, and boys are falling behind in education, among other troubling indicators.

As former Vox fellow Celia Ford has written, the crisis is “driving many young men toward the far-right ‘manosphere’ — where anachronistic attitudes about women, society, and gender roles are resurging.” 

Gary Barker, co-founder and CEO of Equimundo, a global research nonprofit working to “shift norms, narratives, and policies” around gender equality in the US and beyond, has been working for decades to build a counter to the manosphere attitude; it’s what he calls “positive masculinity.” His vision replaces the increasingly regressive view of manhood, based on ruthless competition, aggression, and emotional detachment, with one based on vulnerability, kindness, and warmth.

That vision is being realized through Equimundo’s innovative initiatives: The organization’s educational and activities-based MenCare+ program reduced violence by men against their partners in Rwanda by over 40 percent in a randomized control trial. Similar trials in other countries that used Program H — the organization’s program for young boys and girls — demonstrated positive effects, too. 

Equimundo also operates the IMAGES survey to understand men and women’s attitudes about gender equality, which since 2008 has interviewed 67,000 people in over 30 countries.

“We need to create space for more young men to be curious, to ask questions,” Barker wrote in a 2023 op-ed co-authored with Shaunna Thomas of the feminist nonprofit Ultraviolet. We need space for men, Barker and Thomas wrote, to “be unafraid and to explore a new, healthier model of identity.” — Kenny Torrella, senior reporter

Ken Opalo

Ken Opalo speaks about African politics the way some people talk about family: with affection, frustration, and an understanding of how hard it can be sometimes to make things work. At Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, where he teaches political science, he’s made a study of Africa’s legislatures, tracing how power actually travels through them and how, despite the obstacles, it sometimes finds its way to the people it’s meant to serve.

Born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, and then educated at Yale and Stanford, Opalo established himself with his 2019 book, Legislative Development in Africa, as a gentle challenger to the easy clichés about Africa. The text is academic, but it reads more like a diagnosis (or even a love letter). It provides an account of how governments across the continent have grown not just from colonial scaffolds but from the chaos, ingenuity, and sheer persistence that followed independence. Institutions, he reminds us, aren’t dropped from the sky. They’re built, brick by imperfect brick, through struggle, compromise, and — truly — luck.

These days, Opalo is wrestling with what he calls “the growth question.” To him, development isn’t a glossy summit or a well-phrased aid campaign. It’s about building states that work, schools that teach, tax systems that function, and putting in place leaders who answer to the people who elect them. “Without growth,” he says, “everything else is noise.”

Beyond academia, Opalo writes An Africanist Perspective, a Substack newsletter where he translates political economy into stories that feel as lived-in as they are smart. There’s wit there, and weariness too. But Opalo is no doubt an optimist. He refuses to romanticize but insists that progress in the Global South will come because people refuse to give up on the hard, unglamorous work of democracy.

In both his scholarship and his storytelling, Opalo clearly believes the future is still being written by those who refuse to settle for dysfunction. —Paige Vega, senior climate and Future Perfect editor 

Pascaline Dupas  

Pascaline Dupas is one of the more prolific and accomplished economists dedicated to reducing global poverty.

An economics professor at Princeton University, Dupas has published novel, highly cited papers on how access to banking affects small business development in Kenya, the effects of separating students into groups by achievement levels, and the power of distributing free bednets to prevent malaria, to name just a few. Her research has influenced British foreign aid, government policy in several African countries, the World Health Organization, large NGOs, and global health practitioners.

An avid collaborator, Dupas is also a scientific director at J-PAL — a network of hundreds of researchers conducting randomized control trials (the gold standard in research design) to figure out what policy interventions can best lift households out of poverty. In 2019, J-PAL’s founders were awarded the Nobel prize in economics.

Dupas herself has been directly recognized for her contributions to the field; in 2015, she was named the Best Young French Economist by the French newspaper Le Monde, and years later, was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship. — Kenny Torrella, senior reporter 

Paul Newnham

Paul Newnham wants to make beans sexy. 

If that sounds weird to you, consider that beans are the healthiest, most sustainable (by far), most affordable protein source on Earth. Their richness in vitamins, minerals, and fiber make them an ideal solution to malnutrition in low-income countries, as well as to chronic diet-related diseases in wealthy countries. And they’re diverse and versatile enough to be enjoyed in cuisines from every part of the world, from a garlicky Egyptian ful medames to an indulgent South Asian rajma. 

But beans suffer from a PR problem. They’re so cheap and they’ve long been so foundational to human diets that they aren’t aspirational, generally falling by the wayside as soon as a country becomes rich enough to eat large quantities of meat. Newnham leads Beans Is How — a campaign founded at the COP27 climate conference in 2022, aiming to double global bean consumption by 2028 — to change that. With a coalition of more than 120 partners globally, the initiative has secured commitments to get more beans onto menus around the world, from school meals to high-end, culturally influential restaurants. Partner organization AGRA (formerly the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa), for example, has helped serve high-iron beans, or beans bred to have extra-high iron content, to tens of thousands of schoolchildren in Kenya.   

Creative, ambitious work on beans has already been happening in siloes, from agricultural research to elite gastronomy. Newnham is unifying those efforts into an overhaul of the reputation of the humble bean, repositioning it as a sophisticated, modern solution for both people and the planet. —Marina Bolotnikova, deputy editor

Oliver Kim

The best case for why development economics still matters is being made on Substack. In his Global Developments newsletter, Oliver Kim — a Coefficient Giving research fellow — does something rare. He takes big, messy arguments about poverty, growth, and aid and rebuilds them from the data up. 

That means puncturing zombie “facts,” as he did in a viral post explaining why South Korea was not actually poorer than Kenya in 1960. It’s re-examining foreign aid’s track record with fresh historical series, and writing crisp explainers on workhorse development concepts like exchange rates that answer all the questions you were afraid to ask. 

Kim’s work is approachable without being glib, and rigorous without disappearing into mathiness. It’s also of the moment, focusing on how to direct scarce dollars and political capital toward what actually improves lives. That blend of clarity and empiricism is exactly what’s needed at a time when the competition for every dollar of aid is so intense. Kim’s writing is a compass you can actually steer by. —Bryan Walsh, senior editorial director

Correction, November 20, 12:15 pm ET: A previous version of this post misstated Pascaline Dupas’s job title.

Editor’s note, July 9, 2025, 10:45 am ET: On July 9, Red Bull’s Formula 1 team principal Christian Horner was fired. His removal followed a tough year for the team, one that saw dwindling performance, high turnover of critical engineers, staff and drivers, and rumors about the potential exit of four-time world champ Max Verstappen. As of 10:30 am, a reason hasn’t been made public, but below you’ll find an explainer — initially published on March 8, 2024 — behind last year’s allegations of sexual harassment, a scandal that may have contributed to the downfall of the once-dominant team.

The line between spectacle and sport has always been blurry. But when it comes to Formula 1 — the global motorsport with some of the fastest cars and deepest pockets — the biggest institutional players seem to forget that there’s a difference between delicious drama and  legitimate controversy. 

It’s easy to mistake the two when so much of the elite sport’s success can be attributed to Drive to Survive, the addictive Netflix show that explains the intimidating technicalities and stakes of F1 through the catty interpersonal drama between teammates and competitors alike. My colleague Byrd Pinkerton described the show in 2021 this way: “Basically, imagine the Real Housewives, if the housewives were driving around at 300 kilometers an hour, and if occasionally one of the housewives caught on fire.”

As a result, F1 has experienced years of explosive growth, especially in the US. More eyes has meant more races: You might have heard Las Vegas residents griping about the construction inconveniences and inaccessibility of last November’s brand-new street race. Or how Elon Musk, Shakira, and Vin Diesel rolled out to the Miami Grand Prix. There’s also the sheer stardom of the drivers: thirst traps of Lewis Hamilton going viral, Daniel Ricciardo gracing the cover of GQ, and endless brand deals for nearly everyone on the grid. (That’s where the 20 drivers start the race!)

Right now, though, a controversy might change how people see the ordinarily glitzy sport — especially the growing female fanbase F1 is all too happy to court via social media. In 2022, approximately 40 percent of fans were female, up 8 percent from five years ago, according to Stefano Domenicali, CEO of the Formula 1 Group. 

In early February, energy drink company and team owner Red Bull launched an independent investigation into its Formula 1 team principal, Christian Horner, for potential misconduct toward a team member. Red Bull did not specify the details of the nature of the alleged misconduct nor who it was against, leading to rumors. Horner, who manages team strategy and personnel, was cleared a few days ahead of the start of the season. 

A day after Red Bull dismissed the investigation, a Google Drive folder was anonymously sent to more than 100 reporters, other team principals, and members of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), the governing body for the sport. The folder contains nearly 80 different files, most of which are screenshots of WhatsApp messages between what is allegedly Horner and a female employee. 

Vox is currently in the process of verifying the images and videos. What we can say is that the undated messages include references to intimate acts, requests to delete messages, and what appears to be a nude picture. These WhatsApp messages share space with seemingly professional communication, including about whether this person could work from home.  

Red Bull Racing, its parent company Red Bull GmbH, and Christian Horner did not respond to Vox’s requests for comment about the validity of the messages, the nature of the investigation, anything regarding potentially firing Horner, or whether they have opened any new investigations by time of publication.

While controversy isn’t new to F1 — just look at the cheating scandals, race interference, or the driver who lost his seat because his Russian oligarch father was sanctioned at the beginning of the war in Ukraine — the noise surrounding Horner should be more than fodder for a juicy season of Drive to Survive. It should prompt questions around how to best support the women pit crew members, engineers, assistants, and all other workers in a predominantly male sport. If F1 can’t protect its own female employees in the sport, then the efforts to create a pipeline for female drivers as well as make races safer for the recent influx of female fans will fall flat. 

Currently, much of the coverage of the controversy is focused on whether Red Bull will be able to maintain its enormous lead in the Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships, or speculation about the other person’s identity and motivations in the texts, as if this is gossip fodder about reality stars and not a workplace concern. As of Thursday morning, Red Bull had reportedly suspended a woman who accused Horner of inappropriate behavior. It’s not clear if she is the same person in the texts. And on Friday afternoon, it was reported that Red Bull adviser Helmut Marko could face suspension.

The way everything is shaking out feels more like gossip, rather than a gut check to see if the sport’s institutions are capable of questioning breaches of power. From the FIA to the individual teams and their owners, the sport has proven time and time again that they hide behind claims that everything should “just be about the racing,” rather than having to concern themselves with the people who make it possible. How Formula 1 decides to move from here will determine if their efforts to support women employees and its fans have any merit.

The investigation and allegations against Christian Horner, explained

Most Formula 1 fans would say the sport is pretty boring at the moment: Red Bull driver Max Verstappen, predictably, will take first position in most races. He’s in a league of his own. The engineers and leadership at Red Bull Racing guarantee that.

When you’re constantly crushing the competition, others try to find ways to take you down. There are several instances documented in Drive to Survive of petty reports to the FIA. So when Red Bull announced on February 5 that it would be looking into “certain allegations” made against team principal Christian Horner, it was hard to pin down whether this was an external attempt to get him fired for competition’s sake or if there was veracity to the claims of misconduct. Red Bull’s intentionally vague statement to the media ushered in rumors about “aggressive management.” Of what kind? The company never explicitly said. And it still won’t. 

“One of the biggest quotes from Drive to Survive is [motorsport commentator] Will Buxton always saying ‘In F1, when there’s smoke, there’s usually fire,’” said Kate Byrne, one of the founders of the fan community Two Girls 1 Formula. She explains that such internal matters rarely bubble up to the public, but she feels Red Bull weighing in was a red flag, saying it’s possible they wanted to “get in front of it by saying something. Red Bull will never do that on their own.” 

Red Bull’s outside lawyer, who they refuse to publicly name, cleared Horner of any wrongdoing on February 28 — just ahead of the first Grand Prix of the season in Bahrain. “Red Bull is confident that the investigation has been fair, rigorous, and impartial,” Red Bull’s parent company said in another statement. “The investigation report is confidential and contains the private information of the parties and third parties who assisted in the investigation, and therefore we will not be commenting further out of respect for all concerned.”

Additionally, according to some reports, Red Bull was preparing to fire Horner as early as February 2 — three days before the investigation announcement — but he had allegedly insisted on arbitration. Horner has not made any statements regarding potentially being fired, and during this week’s press conference, he declined to give any more specifics.

“My wife has been phenomenally supportive, as has my family, but the intrusion on my family is now enough,” Horner said during a press conference Thursday in Saudi Arabia. “It is time now to focus on why we are here, which is to go Formula 1 racing.”

Who gets to control the narrative?

Horner’s career will likely be unaffected, given the portrayal of this investigation as simply a scandal rather than a potential workplace misconduct issue. F1 and Red Bull are certainly ensuring that Horner is able to do “business as normal.” So naturally, all eyes were on Red Bull’s two drivers, Max Verstappen and Checo Perez, to scope out their performance last weekend. There were concerns, some raised by Max’s father Jos, who is a former racer, that things at Red Bull might “explode” if nothing is done. If it’s true that tensions were rising within the team, it would be evident in the first race, no? 

As if. Verstappen led the race by a wide margin of about 20 seconds between him and his teammate. Simply put, he was coasting, taking his monster of a car for a joy ride, while no competitors even came close. It was like watching Simone Biles on a playground. After Verstappen snagged first place, Horner was right in front of the podium with his wife, former Spice Girl Gerri Halliwell, and the heir of the Red Bull fortune, Chalerm Yoovidhya. “Better to do your talking on the track,” Horner said after the race.

Focus on the continued dominance of the Red Bull team misses the point, however. Verstappen will continue to perform just fine regardless of tensions, but there are hundreds of women who work for F1 teams who, because of F1’s general mishandling of this whole situation, are being tacitly told that their experiences and safety within the sport don’t matter. If they speak up, they may be ridiculed — all because of the obsessive focus on winning races and ratings.

And yet, the FIA and Red Bull have made no statements or promises about how they’re going to support women (and nonbinary and trans) workers in light of the conversation around Horner. Even the whispers of such behavior should launch wider investigations across teams, set up a stronger whistleblower policy, and add more concrete consequences for senior leadership who do end up embarking on romantic relationships with employees without clearing it with the appropriate bodies. The FIA has not responded to a request for comment on whether they have started an investigation into Horner and Red Bull by the time of this publication.

But given how each F1 team has its own CEO and operates in several different countries, internal protocols and processes vary, according to Nicole Sievers, co-founder of Two Girls 1 Formula.

“In a sport that’s so heavily male dominated, there are also likely pressures on women that are working for these teams,” Sievers said. “That’s a really tough position to be in, especially when you do see kind of the overwhelming majority of the ruling class of F1. We’ve seen that play out historically. Money just breeds power, which breeds a loss of a feeling of consequence.” 

On top of that, so much of the makeup of the current media pool skews a certain way: older, male, white. This old guard has been covering F1 for a very long time. Coverage around sexism, racism, and other types of discrimination may not be top of mind.

Strict rules on F1 coverage don’t help. Typically in American sports, getting press accreditation is fairly routine, but with F1, there are very strict rules for who is eligible and what you can produce, from prohibiting moving images to not providing credentials to websites that don’t meet certain traffic figures on their F1 coverage, with relatively small-scale offenses resulting in extended bans.

When there’s such a tight leash on reporters, asking hard questions with an eye for accountability becomes difficult. As Lily Herman, author of the F1 culture newsletter Engine Failure, explains, “There are all these fears that exist in F1 around, ‘Hey, if I speak up, I’m going to get my media access revoked or my entire media organization will if I do something wrong.’”

A perfect case study of this dynamic can be seen with Road & Track’s editor-in-chief Daniel Pund taking down a critical piece by Kate Wagner analyzing the opulence of Formula 1 because he felt it was the “wrong story” for the publication. The story itself was entertaining, but not necessarily news-breaking, and the removal raised questions about whether the FIA reached out (according to Pund, they haven’t).

What does this mean for women in motorsport

How this story ultimately unfolds will demonstrate if F1 understands its changing fanbase and what it takes to make its employees feel supported, and whether it can get with the times. 

“As someone who loves the sport, it’s definitely disappointing to see what’s going on right now,” said Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes driver and seven-time world champion, during media day for this weekend’s race in Saudi Arabia. “It doesn’t look good to the outside world. It doesn’t look good from the inside either. It’s a really pivotal moment for the sport, in terms of what we project to the world and how it’s handled.” 

By sweeping such allegations under the rug, Red Bull may hope the various dramas of the sport will cause the news to die out. That’s wrong. If anything, F1’s growing female fanbase is hungry for accountability. 

“We need to firmly stake our chair to the ground at the table and say: ‘We’re not leaving and we’re going to force you to be better,’” Byrne said. To her, what employees face mirrors the experiences of fans. You can’t improve one without the other, and turning off the sport won’t help, she added. “The only way you can do that is not by stopping, but by continuing to go on and being louder about it.” 

And we’ve seen fans demand equal pay for female workers, safety protections for all fans regardless of gender identity at races, and increasing opportunities for female drivers through F1 Academy. The sport, of course, made promises that it will do better in these avenues. Talk is just talk though, if there aren’t actions to back it up when the stakes have never been higher. (F1 Academy, for instance, was criticized for not being broadcasted during its debut in 2023.)

“I always question very openly what exactly the point of all of this is,” Herman said, “It’s great that women are getting opportunities like F1 Academy. But we should always kind of question what exactly those opportunities are, what they do, and who they don’t extend to. What’s just kind of lip service being paid in the moment of crisis?”

At the end of the day, we’re talking about people’s lives, not just some reality TV show. When winning is prioritized over well-being, we all lose.

Update, July 9, 2025: This story, initially published March 8, 2024, has been updated at the top with news of Horner’s firing from the Red Bull team.

On April Fools’ Day, I called my mom. I told her that for a month, I was “going flip phone” — meaning, abandoning my iPhone for one with no access to social media apps. And no, it wasn’t a joke. 

My discontent with my screen time reached new peaks in late March after a stint in physical therapy and a string of near-constant rainy days. 

But first, some context: I stare at screens all day for a living, and I’m no stranger to life affixed to a computer, palm-sized or not. I grew up in the 2000s, playing Neopets and the Sims 2. I later inherited my mom’s busted iPhone 3GS in 2011 as an eighth-grader, and said goodbye to my LG Lotus flip phone. I’ve been on Instagram since within a year of its launch.  

For more than a decade, I lived by the idea of “good screen” and “bad screen.” That is, bad screen is work/school-related, and good screen is just for the vibes, like spending an hour or so in a Wikipedia rabbit hole. Good screen felt like a reclamation of my own time.

Until it didn’t. 

Turns out, good screen is actually a farce. We didn’t know it at the time in the 2010s, but increased use of smartphones and social media was probably bad for my then-developing brain. According to an October 2024 CDC report, the percentage of teenagers who had symptoms of anxiety or depression was higher among those with four hours or more of daily screen time. 

For me, the decision came about because I realized that my phone was getting in the way of doing literally anything else. Like going to a coffee shop with a friend. Or playing evening soccer and getting a drink after. Or hosting dinner parties. If there’s one thing I’ve learned while working here alongside Even Better’s Allie Volpe, the key to a good life is to get some sun early in the day, do regular movement, and socialize often.

So “dumbphone” it was. 

Going Barbie phone

The rules, my boss said, were simple. I had a $100 budget. (Him: “I mean, it goddamn better be under $100. It won’t do anything.”) And I had to go the whole way. That meant I couldn’t switch back and forth between phones. The only exception was using my iPhone for two-factor authentication apps.

“I wonder if you’ll have any friends left over by the end,” my boss, editorial director Bryan Walsh, slacked me. “Or maybe more because you’ll call them up on your telephone. Maybe you’ll get new friends, better ones.” 

The strict budget ruled out fancy but still internet-free dumbphones like the Light Phone my colleague Adam Clark Estes tried out last month. So I first turned to older flip phones. 

My partner’s parents had an old Motorola Razr chilling in a drawer, and I had always wanted one when I was a kid (or a T-Mobile Sidekick or LG Chocolate). But after hours of trying to figure out if the phone was compatible with my carrier, I learned that the infrastructure in the US for 2G connection was shut down this year. I couldn’t use anything that wasn’t at least 4G. I effectively had to get a new phone. 

Naturally, I stalked the internet’s best resource for financial decision-making: Reddit. I checked out tons of posts on r/dumbphones, and finally decided to go for the (at the time) $90 HMD Barbie Phone. It had maps, texts, and a camera — but no app store. It technically does have internet, but it is so impossible to use that it might as well not be there. 

Social butterfly?

When my friends heard about my little experiment, they were worried, thrilled, partially envious, and wondering how on earth we would plan our Formula 1 race weekend watch parties.

I didn’t set any intentional goal of how often to reach out to people or make plans. But in the absence of mindlessly scrolling on Instagram or TikTok, I was motivated to reach out to people. 

Still, my texts were very stilted because of the numeric keypad. Some of my friends were annoyed about this within a week. One texted me to ask about my thoughts on tariffs, and I replied, “Hmm hard 2 say.” A few hours later, she texted me with some personal news that warranted a swift phone call. “I can feel yourself restraining your thoughts in your texts! But it’s nice to just hear your voice right now,” she said in that call. 

This friend lives in a different city, so I don’t get to see her as often. But because we weren’t seeing what the other was up to on Instagram, we called each other a lot more often than we usually would have. 

Speaking of Instagram…what a double-edged sword! It’s either a black hole of endless, pointless scrolling or it’s how you find out about the latest party, book release event, or restaurant opening. I definitely missed out on a lot of potential hangs by not being on IG, but at the same time, would I have actually spontaneously gone to any of them? I’m not so sure. 

I did cheat a bit by opting to text friends via my personal computer whenever I had the chance to. This also let me participate in some group chats since the Barbie phone doesn’t have that capability. 

And I called my mom way more. That’s saying something because I talk to both of my parents essentially every other day with my normal phone. I flew to see my dad in Tennessee and visited my partner’s parents in Westchester for Easter. I even planned an intergenerational return with my grandparents to Puerto Rico for May.

Life after dumbphone

All in all, I about doubled the number of in-person hangs, although my memory is a bit fuzzy. I’m someone who lives and dies by my Google Calendar, and I wasn’t great at version control between my physical planner and the g-cal. And I don’t have many photo reminders of what I did. 

However, I did not last an entire month. 

I fell two days short, thanks to that sporadic trip to Puerto Rico. I had to order Ubers, consult spreadsheets, figure out access codes, find restaurants that everyone actually wanted to eat at, and keep in touch with people we were hanging out with. If you’re a caretaker or if your work demands that you be online 24/7, I’m not sure if a smartphone detox is right for you. 

And honestly, there were some things I missed from my regular iPhone. Having no music during runs made me dread jogging, so I didn’t run for an entire month. I couldn’t scan QR code menus at restaurants. If I didn’t have directions written down somewhere, I was constantly anxious about getting lost since Google Maps on the Barbie phone wasn’t all that. I also took fewer photos. (Sorry, Bad Bunny, I know I should take more.) 

Still, my life felt more full because of the burst of spontaneity encouraging deeper connections with my friends and family. My attention span also no longer seemed like it’s the size of a small pea. And while I didn’t start this experiment out of concern for my mental health, it did help me feel more socially connected, something that puts people at less risk for depression. 

I’m now much more deliberate in valuing off-the-cuff hangs. Just last week, I went to a bar to watch the Knicks game, and called a friend who I haven’t seen in a few months. And yes, it was on the Barbie phone.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!