Under the Taliban rule in the mid 1990s, most Afghan children had no opportunity to play sports. So in the summer of 2004, after the fall of the Taliban, Awista Ayub, who had grown up in Afghanistan, brought eight Afghan girls to the United States for a soccer clinic.

In her newly published book, Kabul Girls Soccer Club, Ayub tells her own story and how these eight girls found the strength in each other, in teamwork, and in themselves, to take risks to obtain the kinds of freedoms that many of us take for granted. Fifteen teams now compete in the Afghanistan Football Federation, with hundreds of girls participating.

For a year now, Nick Pearson has been preparing the launch of his first model, mobile maternal health clinic in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, where 100,000 women give birth each year. Most deliver at home with an unskilled birth attendant or go to a public facility where conditions are often appalling.

“Our ambition is to change the way maternity care is provided for the more than one million poor women giving birth each year in urban East Africa,” said Pearson, the founder of Jacaranda Health. “We aim to become the largest provider of affordable maternity care in the region, and more importantly raise the standard of care among other private and public providers.”

Journalism today is like bad parenting, says author and journalist David Bornstein. “What journalists do is get up every morning and tell people what’s wrong," he said. 

"If a parent tells a child every morning what is wrong with him, the kid will likely end up in an institution. Journalism today is like bad parenting – it is not based on how change happens.”

In rural Uganda, only ten percent of women have access to radios. Women, unlike men, can be perceived as lazy if they listen to radio programs even when they are on such practical topics as agricultural techniques. 

So Deborah Naybor founded Both Your Hands in order to provide free, recycled MP3 players to women, allowing them to learn from programs on planting strategies, weed reduction, HIV/AIDS, prevention of domestic violence, childcare, and any other topics they request, while doing their daily work. Naybor's project, “Co-op Audio: MP3 Education for Rural Women,” is one of 258 entries in the Women | Tools | Technology: Building Opportunities & Economic Power Challenge.