The Solve Effect

84,000 people, one glacial flood, and a news cycle that has already moved on.

Björn Söderberg and Build up Nepal haven't. For over a decade, they've worked with Nepalese entrepreneurs to build safer, greener homes. Now they're creating flood-ready shelters for families who lost everything.

Episode highlights: 

Reiteration required for resilience: Björn’s wife told him that bamboo structures simply weren’t good enough. People wanted the dignity of brick homes. So he found a way to make them better, more eco-friendly, and much more earthquake-resistant. 

Partnership makes it work: One of the key parts of Build up Nepal’s success is partnership. The team teaches local entrepreneurs to manufacture sustainable bricks in a process that revitalizes economies and puts ownership in local communities' hands. 

Open source over everything: Market disruption is the name of the game. With an open-source method of creating compressed earth blocks, Björn hopes that anyone who lives in communities vulnerable to earthquakes and flooding can use this technology. 

Full transcript available here. 

Solve is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, and this special series, hosted by Alexander Dale, Director of Global Programs at MIT Solve, highlights 10 Solvers from the past decade who embody the spirit of Solve: innovation, grit, resilience, and impact. Learn more and get involved in our work here: solve.mit.edu 

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What does it take to make a bold business change and bring the people affected along with you?

On The Solve Effect, MIT Solve’s Hala Hanna talks with Stacy Brown-Philpot, former TaskRabbit CEO and founder and managing partner of Cherryrock Capital, about leadership, trust, and expanding opportunity for entrepreneurs.

In this episode:

Changing the TaskRabbit model: Why moving from an auction system to direct hiring raised task fulfillment from 50% to more than 90%—and sparked a backlash from Taskers.

Listening through disruption: What Brown-Philpot learned about communicating change, building trust, and caring for the people who rely on a platform.

Backing founders overlooked by traditional venture capital: How Brown-Philpot raised $170 million for Cherryrock Capital after more than 360 meetings—and how the firm helps underinvested founders access capital and networks to scale.

Leading from her roots: The lessons Brown-Philpot carries from growing up in Detroit, including her grandmother’s advice to stand for something.

Finding belonging: Why Brown-Philpot no longer feels she has to prove she belongs—and what she hopes her daughters learn from watching her.

Full transcript available here.

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Go behind the scenes at Solve Challenge Finals in this bonus episode of “The Solve Effect.” Guest host and co-producer Elisabeth Graham takes you through a day at Solve’s biggest event of the year, held in New York during the United Nations General Assembly and Climate Week.

Hear conversations with Solve Innovator Program Lead, Taewee Kahrs, MIT President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif, Artist and Designer, Mara Hoffman, and Solve Executive Director, Hala Hanna, plus members of the 2026 Solver Class: Carlo Charles of Flint Paper Battery, Janet Lindow of RBHI, Oliver Utne of Kara Solar, and Elena Martinez Martinez of BlueGea Group.

 Full transcript available here.

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Ask Amr Abodraiaa what Rology looks like from the patient's side, and the answer is: nothing at all. Invisibility is the design goal. What the patient gets is the result.

Rology was selected as a 2023 Health Solver. Amr came to the problem as an engineer rather than a doctor, co-founding the company in 2017 to connect hospitals with a global network of remote radiologists. Rology is now FDA-cleared and has delivered more than 1.4 million radiology reports across 13 countries in Africa and the Middle East.

Episode highlights:

The problem was never the machine: The scanner was already in the hospital. The person qualified to read the scan was not. Amr explains why he stopped building the next new “cool” technology and started building the system around it.

Zero setup cost, every time: No new servers, no VPNs, no bandwidth upgrades. Nearly a decade and an FDA clearance later, that mandate still governs every feature Rology ships.

LLMs and VLMs: Machine learning routes each scan to the right specialist and cuts repeat imaging. Vision-language models now draft the report itself. The real gains, Amr says, come from running both together.

Full transcript available here.

Solve is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, and this special series, hosted by Alexander Dale, Director of Global Programs at MIT Solve, highlights 10 Solvers from the past decade who embody the spirit of Solve: innovation, grit, resilience, and impact. Learn more and get involved in our work here: solve.mit.edu 

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Join our CrowdSolve mailing list for more social impact news: https://solve.mit.edu/newsletters

Make sure to follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook.

Nabiha Syed has been a media lawyer, a newsroom CEO, and now leads the Mozilla Foundation—three careers, one question: does technology hand people power, or quietly take it away? She and Hala Hanna get into human-scale AI, why trust is becoming the only real moat, and the things we shouldn't build at all. Plus: toasters, aunties, and why curiosity is a birthright.

Full transcript available here.

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Helena Samsioe had been to more than 50 countries before she turned 15.

Her parents worked as doctors across Africa and Asia, and that upbringing taught her something that would eventually become a business: the world looks completely different depending on where you are standing. Satellites flatten that difference. Clouds get in the way, resolution drops off, and the closer to the ground the real story lives, the more the picture falls apart.

Helena is our fourth guest in the 10 Years, 10 Solvers series. Solve is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, and this special series, hosted by Alexander Dale, Director of Global Programs at MIT Solve, highlights 10 Solvers from the past decade who embody the spirit of Solve: innovation, grit, resilience, and impact.

Solve selected Globhe for our 2021 Health Security and Pandemics Challenge. Five years later, the platform connects organizations to more than 12,000 certified drone operators in 150 countries, every one of them local to the place they fly.

Tune in for a conversation all about:

The pivot hiding in your own data: Globhe spent its first three years as a drone delivery company. Then clients started asking to buy footage from the delivery routes instead of the deliveries. Helena explains how to hear what the market is actually telling you.

Why the pilot should always be local: Cost, regulation, and impact all point in the same direction. Helena walks through why Globhe never flies operators in from Sweden, and how AI-powered quality control makes that model hold up.

Building an industry, not just a company: In 2015, drones were either military equipment or Hollywood cameras, with almost nothing in between. Helena shares what it took to help shape the regulatory frameworks that made everything since possible.

Courage over hope: Asked to pick one for the future, Helena chooses courage. Hope is hard to sustain, she says, unless you have the courage to pursue it.

Full transcript available here.

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Snap two magnetic blocks together, and a light comes on. In that second, wonder becomes pride because you made it.

Ayah Bdeir built a career on that distinction. littleBits, her magnetic electronics kits, turned millions of kids from tech users into inventors and now sit in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Today she runs Current AI, working with governments, philanthropies, and builders to make public-interest AI real at scale. The reason: the AI we've been handed is the anti-littleBits, sealed and obscure and shipped by a handful of companies.

Tune in for a conversation all about:

The Iftar table AI got wrong: An AI-generated dinner flyer came back with orange hummus. Ayah couldn’t let that slide, and so she worked and iterated until a wayward prompt became an entire mission for cultural preservation at Current AI.

Fund, build, bridge: Six months in, Ayah is running a tech company, a philanthropy, and a government body at once. AI's pace is the only reason those three can move together.

AI's Linux moment: Governments want resilience, enterprises want a cheaper stack, local communities want models that speak their dialect. Ayah makes the case that open can win economically too, but only if you sell the medicine with the sugar.

Full transcript available here.

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How do millions of strangers come to trust one another enough to share a common reality?

In this episode of The Solve Effect, we welcome Katherine Maher, President and CEO of NPR and former CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. Katherine has spent her career building and leading the institutions that help us make sense of the world together—Wikipedia, Signal, and now public media, at a moment when trust in nearly every one of those institutions is under strain.

Tune into a conversation all about:

The Trust Ladder: As local newspapers have disappeared, Katherine explains how we lost the "lowest rung" that once connected our understanding of our neighborhoods to the nation—and why that's fueling polarization today.

Truth vs. Facts: Katherine's TED Talk on truth sparked pushback, including from Elon Musk. She unpacks the difference between the facts we can agree on and the deeper truths we each carry, and why admitting what we don't know builds trust rather than erodes it.

AI and the Open Web: Katherine explains what's at stake when models are trained on models, and why she still believes the open web is worth fighting for.

Leading Without Fear or Favor: As NPR faces federal funding cuts, Katherine makes the case for why mission-driven institutions can out-compete the market for trust and attention and what that looks like in practice.

Full transcript available here.

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Namya Mahajan built a product for parents. Daycare workers started using it too, without anyone asking them to.

Namya is our third guest in the 10 Years, 10 Solvers series. Solve is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, and this special series (hosted by Alexander Dale, Director of Global Programs at MIT Solve) highlights 10 Solvers from the past decade who embody the spirit of Solve: innovation, grit, resilience, and impact.

Namya co-founded Rocket Learning in 2020, meeting parents where they already are: WhatsApp. The nonprofit sends bite-sized, science-backed learning activities in local languages, using things like dough instead of clay and turmeric water instead of paint. Today it reaches more than 6 million children across 16 Indian states, for about $1.50 per child, per year.

Tune in for a conversation all about:

Building for the people who show up: When Namya's team noticed daycare workers using parent-facing content in their own classrooms, they didn't fight it—they built an entire educator program around it. It now reaches 400,000 daycare workers across India.

Proving it, the hard way: A multi-year randomized controlled trial with J-PAL showed one of the highest effect sizes in education—at a fraction of the typical cost. Namya shares what it took to run an evaluation nobody thought they were ready for.

The pitch that missed: Namya walks through a fundraising meeting that went sideways, and what it taught her about listening before you sell your solution.

What comes next: Namya's team is now building an AI-powered tool to personalize learning for millions of children and support the daycare workers teaching them.

Full transcript available here.

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Kumi Naidoo once helped lead a funeral for an iceberg.

Several hundred people gathered in Iceland to mourn something precious that had been with us for centuries and was never coming back. That single act of mourning generated more powerful coverage than almost any campaign from his six years leading Greenpeace. It taught him a lesson he’s carried ever since: facts aim at the brain, but movements are built by speaking to the heart, the body, and the soul. 

On this episode of The Solve Effect, Hala Hanna sits down with Kumi Naidoo: human rights and climate justice activist, former head of Greenpeace International and Amnesty International, and now president of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. From organizing against apartheid as a teenager to building a global “artivism” movement inspired by his late son, the rapper Ricky Rick, Kumi shares what four decades of struggle have taught him about grief, purpose, and refusing to give up.

Tune in for a conversation all about:

Turning off the tap: Fossil fuels drive 86% of climate change, yet for 30 years we’ve mopped the floor without touching the faucet. Kumi makes the case for a binding global treaty to phase them out—in terms your auntie would understand.

Artivism in action: Why “Save Santa Claus” might have been a better banner than “Stop Arctic Destruction,” and how harnessing arts and culture can supply the thing our movements are missing most: imagination.

Participation as the antidote to despair: Whatever the question, the answer is community. Kumi explains why everyone—from single moms to art teachers—has a pathway into this fight, and how his sister Kay proved that the most invisible people often make the biggest contributions.

Joy as resistance: How do you tell the truth about a crisis without immobilizing people? And why is keeping your sense of humor a political act?

Full transcript available here. 

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Email us at [email protected].