Solving the World's Greatest Problems

What happens when the factory moves to the farm? David Payne, a former Wall Street bond trader and co-founder of Kentegra Biotechnology, helped build one in Kenya so the money from a Kenyan crop stays in Kenya.

The crop is pyrethrum, a white flower that kills insects naturally. It was once Kenya's third-largest export, behind coffee and tea, until cheaper lab-made pesticides took over in the 1990s. David tells Justin Forman how Kentegra built its plant in the middle of COVID, signed about 20,000 small farmers, and spent years winning Europe's toughest approvals. He explains why one acre of flowers can bring in most of a small farm's cash, how farmers with no bank built savings groups that almost never default, and why he moved his wife and four daughters to Kenya.

In this episode:

The flower behind coffee and tea

Why the factory belongs where the crop grows

From Wall Street to Kenya

How a lab wiped out a Kenyan export

Building a plant during COVID

One acre that pays the bills

A bank with no bank

Winning Europe's hardest approval

God said move to Kenya

Learn more about the Hunger Fund: solving.org/hunger

Full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrFUoso7_AI

What if the food we send to hungry people is part of the reason they stay hungry?

Joel Cunningham is CEO of Hamara and a fifth-generation Zimbabwean. His family has spent 40 years in African farming, and they failed for a long time before they found what works. He tells Zac Sicher that most hunger in Africa is not caused by famine or war. It is caused by broken systems. Small farmers have good land around them but cannot reach good feed, vets, trucks or buyers. When charities hand out food in places like that, they can put local farmers out of business and leave people depending on help that eventually leaves.

Joel walks through how Hamara works instead: a buyer places an order first, farming clubs bid for it, Hamara pays for the chicks and feed, and the farmer is paid at the end. Zac shares the story of a farmer who went from about $500 a year to about $3,000 a year in 18 months. They also talk honestly about why we give, and what it means to love the poor well.

In this episode:

The charity that gave away eggs

Why most hunger in Africa is not famine

Best land, still hungry

Giving to feel better, or giving to solve the problem

How a small farmer can sell to a big buyer

Why cash never touches the farmer's hands

Loans that charge 4 to 7 percent a month

A heart for the poor and a mind for the poor

Learn more about the Hunger Fund: solving.org/hunger

Dallas Jenkins created The Chosen, the TV series about the life of Jesus, after his big Hollywood movie bombed and he had no idea what came next. He says the hardest part of success is staying broken and surrendered once it comes.

Dallas talks with Justin Forman, co-founder of Solving the World's Greatest Problems, about the short film he shot behind a barn in Illinois for his church's Christmas Eve service, and the people in prison who told him it made them feel seen for the first time. He explains why his team did not know if they had money for the show's next four episodes, why giving it away free made it grow, and how he broke a need for approval he carried for 42 years. He also shares his five loaves and two fish plan, why there are more non-missionaries than missionaries in the Bible, and what he felt on the last of 528 days of filming.

Chapters

00:00 Now you're ready

02:54 Day 528 of filming

06:25 No money for episode five

08:42 Same lake, bigger stage

11:52 Flop, then a barn

16:58 Jesus and business owners

23:18 Is ambition wrong?

30:15 Affirmation was his drug

33:30 What broke the habit

37:15 Be a control freak

41:15 What The Chosen fixed

44:32 Broken before blessed

47:11 Never seven seasons again

Links

The Chosen: https://www.thechosen.tv

Come and See Foundation: https://www.comeandseefoundation.org

Talk to our team: https://solving.org/talk-to-someone/

About the show

Solving the World's Greatest Problems backs the entrepreneurs and organizations working at the root of the problems most people have given up on. We fund them, tell their stories, and show what is actually moving.

Full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/rzss-ds2l2A

Casey Crawford co-founded Movement Mortgage, where he is CEO, and capped his lifestyle before the money came.

Casey sits down with Justin Forman at the Billy Graham Library to talk about why money is so hard to talk about, and how he got free of it. At 22, an older teammate told him to decide how much was enough before the money came, write it down, and tell a few people. He did. He also talks about arguing with God over his own money, why giving gets harder as wealth grows, and why he started treating his giving with the same care as his investments.

In this episode:

Deciding how much is enough before you get rich

Arguing with God about your own money

Why giving freezes as wealth grows

Going upstream on the world's darkest problems

Giving with the same care as investing

Learn more about The Evangelism Gap Fund: solving.org/evangelism

Sean Dunn preached to stadiums for years. Then one paragraph in a book told him there were 33 million teenagers in America, and he realized the people he most wanted to reach were never in the room. "Scripture says go. And I kept saying come." In 2017 he moved his whole ministry, Groundwire, onto young people's phones.

Sean is the president of Groundwire, and he tells Justin Forman how the model works: interrupt instead of invite, a short video that shows a young person how they feel before it says a word about God, a coach ready to talk 24/7, and websites that carry the message in the address, like jesuscares.com and whenlifehurts.com. He also tells the story of the financial planner who said "I don't believe you," the audit that followed, and why every dollar Groundwire spends now reaches more people than the last one.

In this episode:

• Why "come to church" stopped working
• What an interruption looks like in a feed
• The message has to be in the URL
• The data is accurate. Your assumption is not.
• "Sean, I don't believe you. Your numbers are too good."
• Better than linear
• The one problem Groundwire has not solved yet

Learn more about Solving The Evangelism Gap Fund: solving.org/the-evangelism-gap

Set a number for your own security and the day you reach it is the day you are finished. That is John C. Maxwell's argument in this episode. He has written 92 books on leadership, trained leaders in every country in the world, and he says the people he meets who crossed their finish line still had thirty good years in front of them.

Maxwell tells Justin Forman how a leadership class in Jackson, Mississippi turned into a cassette tape club, why his publisher's news about who was buying his books sent him out of a church he loved, and why he spent seven or eight years after that saying almost nothing about his faith. He and his brother Larry started EQUIP in 1996 to train leaders in countries that have very few of them. It now runs 191,000 small groups, Maxwell says four million people have come to Christ through them in six years at about four dollars each, and he puts the present aim at a million people a month within six years. Along the way: what he does with the money past his number, why he keeps names and addresses rather than estimates, and the question he still has not answered in a book.

Chapters

00:00 Four million and nobody knew

02:46 The pink cassette tapes

09:49 What keeps the two apart

12:03 Why safe is the wrong goal

16:11 Rewards you have to earn

21:27 The finish line problem

25:31 Pick a number for others

30:27 The good news we hide

36:49 The day he crossed over

43:43 Values first, then faith

46:44 Four dollars a person

John C. Maxwell - https://www.linkedin.com/in/officialjohnmaxwell/

EQUIP Leadership - https://www.linkedin.com/company/equipleadership/

The Evangelism Gap Fund - https://solving.org/evangelism/

Solving the World's Greatest Problems - https://solving.org

Justin Forman - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jforman/

Solving the World's Greatest Problems is a community of givers taking on the root causes of the world's deepest suffering. We fund the breakthroughs happening right now, together.

Full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xd3Lsvmgk4

Who paid for the first English Bible? Who paid for Amazing Grace? 

John Rinehart spent years chasing that question and kept finding the same pattern behind movements of God: a preacher everyone remembers, and a giver nobody does. William Tyndale had a cloth merchant who housed him and funded a translation that was illegal at the time. George Whitefield had an aristocrat. John Newton had a businessman who paid to print his hymns and hand them out. And Luke 8 says Jesus' own three years of ministry were funded by three women, named, out of their own means.

John is the founder of Gospel Patrons and the author of Gospel Patrons and 31 Gospel Patrons. He talks with Justin Forman about why radical generosity was normal Christianity in the book of Acts, why it is impossible to lose when you give, the years he spent believing business leaders were second-class Christians, and the coffee in Sydney that changed his life.

In this episode:

The three things Jesus could have done to fund himself

Who actually paid for Amazing Grace

Why giving is never a loss

The couple who funded the JESUS film

Believing you are a second-class Christian

What the rich young ruler forfeited

Not everything with Jesus' name on it has your name on it

Learn more about the Evangelism Gap Fund: solving.org/the-evangelism-gap

Pulling the Jenga Block: How Faith-Driven Capital Can Solve Structural Hunger

Host Justin Forman sits down with Zac Sicher, Fund Manager for Hunger & Joblessness at Solving the World's Greatest Problems, alongside Henry Kaestner and Rebecca Yuschak, for a conversation that reframes generosity as a coordinated, professionally-managed strategy rather than a scattershot of individual good intentions.

Zac left a trading desk at Goldman Sachs — where he'd worked through the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Russia's invasion of Ukraine — to spend eighteen months crisscrossing Africa, listening to farmers, entrepreneurs, and political leaders before ever proposing a solution. That listening tour shaped how he now leads SWGP's Giving Fund for hunger and joblessness: find the specific "Jenga block" in a broken system, and pull it, rather than trying to fix everything at once.

Key Topics:

• Why SWGP treats giving funds like professionally-managed investment funds, not one-off donations
• The difference between acute and structural hunger — and why only one of them can be solved with markets and innovation
• Zac's path from Goldman Sachs trading desk to fund manager, and the moment he said yes to God without knowing what it would look like
• The 21x yield gap between an average American ear of corn and a smallholder farmer's crop in Zimbabwe — and what closing it could mean
• How a donor-advised fund structure lets capital move between grants and investments as a theory of change gets proven
• Why 30–40% of food produced in Africa is wasted before it reaches anyone, and where market innovation can plug that gap
• How entrepreneurs, investors, and givers are being brought together as one community instead of working in silos

This conversation matters for anyone who's felt the weight of the world's biggest problems and wondered where their time, capital, or attention could actually make a dent. Zac and the SWGP team make the case that the answer isn't more hustle — it's better structure, better community, and a clearer theory of change.

Watch the full episode on YouTube or continue to stream audio on your favorite podcast platform. Learn more about the Giving Funds and how to get involved at solving.org.

Alan Barnhart and his brother capped their own lifestyle in 1986, before their business made real money. In 2008 they signed 99% of the company, worth hundreds of millions, over to a ministry.

He says the decision was self-preservation rather than generosity, and that his family have been the beneficiaries of it, not the givers. He explains why he refuses to tell anyone how much to give, why he is a proponent of not leaving his children a fortune, and why giving while you are alive beats giving at death by 30 to 40 percent.

Brandon West runs a 24-person creative agency in Gainesville, Florida. It has funded 37 care centers fighting sex trafficking and extreme poverty, five years ahead of the goal he set. It started with one sponsored child bought on a whim at a concert, and a moment sitting in QuickBooks where he could not work out which category the charge belonged in.

The turn in this conversation is not the number. It is the day a nonprofit director told Brandon that the woman who used to clean his offices was the first trafficking survivor their city ever reached, and that she had been asking them to go and meet whoever owned that company. He had no idea.

Brandon and host Justin Forman talk about what happens when the blinders come off. Why his leadership team laughed when he first said the words safe house, and why every bed was full within a month of it opening. What he learned riding along on street outreach at one in the morning, when he was told to stay in the car. What the word dignity means when you watch someone receive a gift basket and ask what they owe for it. And the rule he gives anyone frozen by the size of the problem: do for the one what you wish you could do for the many.

In this episode: the cleaner nobody knew was a survivor. Why his leadership team laughed. All the beds full inside a month. Told to stay in the car at 1am. What dignity means in a gift basket. The QuickBooks entry that changed his math. A stranger's message that became $150,000. And where to start when the problem is bigger than you are.

Solving the World's Greatest Problems is a show for builders who want their work to count against the problems that outlast them. Entrepreneurs, investors and operators, telling what they actually did and what it cost.

Get into the fight against trafficking: https://solving.org/trafficking 

More at https://solving.org/