Only Good News

Start the new year right with our list of heartwarming, awe-inspiring and straight-up happy-making reasons to smile, from around the world

- Anna-Kaisa Walker, Flannery Dean, Lisa Bendall, Jason McBride, and Naorem Anuja

1 LIFTING THE LOAD 

For the 70 per cent of the world's population without access to electric washing machines, simply keeping up with laundry is a time-consuming task. The burden falls disproportionately to women and girls, many of whom spend 20 hours a week hand-scrubbing clothes, often without electricity or running water. But 31-year-old Navjot Sawhney, an engineer based. in London, has come up with an off-grid solution: a portable, lightweight washing machine powered by a hand crank. Sawhney calls it the Diyva, after the woman who inspired the project his former next-door neighbour in southern India, where he spent a year volunteering after leaving his job as an engineer at high-end vacuum maker Dyson. He returned to the UK to found the Washing Machine Project in 2018. After a few months developing a prototype, he received a grant from Oxfam's Iraq Response Innovation Lab. Since December 2022, nearly 200 Divyas, which resemble a plastic drum, have been distributed impacting almost 22,000 people across six countries. By saving 75 per cent of the time required to wash clothes, he says, women and girls will be freer to pursue education. "The feedback was overwhelmingly positive," Sawhney says. His goal is to deliver 8,000 machines to 10 countries over the next three years.

2 SMALL COUNTRIES THAT MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE