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The World Radar · the Index

Problems the world wants solved.

Every problem the Radar has logged, most recent first: framed to one standard, each shown with where it came from. Nothing here comes from a user. Pick one and start solving. Free, no card.

Edition 1 · 21 Sep · 20 problems across 1 edition

Ed. 1

MediaProblem 0012

Use of AI assistants for news is rising while stated trust in them stays very low: people take answers from a source they openly doubt, because it is faster than the alternative. The gap is not ignorance; it is the absence of anything that lets a reader check an answer at the moment they receive it, without abandoning it and starting a separate search.

Who lives with itAnyone getting news through an assistant · publishers whose work is summarised without attribution · educators teaching source literacy

Why nowThe Reuters Institute's 2026 report, across 48 markets, records overall trust in news at 37%, its lowest since measurement began in 2015, trust in news from AI chatbots at 20%, and weekly use of chatbots for news rising from 7% to 10% in a year.

Why it matters · the JudgeDoubt without a remedy is where trust products get built. Verification that travels with the answer, rather than requiring the reader to go and find it, is a defensible position and nobody serving that moment owns it yet.

Inspired by reporting from Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

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Ed. 1

FinanceProblem 0007

Small firms are assessed on documents they were never required to produce. Audited accounts, filed returns and collateral registries are what credit models expect; a profitable shop with a phone, a supplier relationship and ten years of trading has none of them. The lender cannot see the business, so the business does not exist to the lender, and the money goes to whoever already had the paperwork.

Who lives with itOwner-managed and informal firms · community and development lenders · the suppliers already extending them credit informally

Why nowThe IFC estimates an unmet financing need of about $5.2 trillion for formal micro, small and medium enterprises and a further $2.9 trillion for informal ones, with roughly 70% of MSMEs in emerging markets lacking adequate finance: firms that together account for around 70% of employment worldwide.

Why it matters · the JudgeThe signal exists and is being thrown away: supply ledgers, payments, logistics records and phone data describe a business more honestly than a filed account. Turning transaction exhaust into a defensible credit view is the product, and the financing gap it would help close is measured in trillions.

Inspired by reporting from International Finance Corporation

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Ed. 1

EnergyProblem 0002

The constraint on the energy transition moved from manufacturing to administration, and no tooling followed it. Projects sit in interconnection queues longer than they took to design, studies are redone by hand each time the queue ahead reshuffles, and developers cannot see where they stand or what would move them. Most of the capacity that enters the queue is eventually withdrawn, often after years of waiting.

Who lives with itIndependent power producers · utility interconnection teams · the financiers whose models assume a connection date

Why nowLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's latest queue analysis counts roughly 8,200 active projects representing over two terawatts of generation and storage, a median wait from request to operation of more than five years, and about three quarters of the capacity that requested connection between 2000 and 2020 later withdrawn.

Why it matters · the JudgeA queueing and document problem wearing an engineering costume, exactly the kind that goes unsolved because no single party owns both ends of it. Faster paperwork is the cheapest capacity available anywhere on the grid.

Inspired by reporting from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

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Ed. 1

Enterprise AIProblem 0009

The tooling that would protect a small firm assumes somebody to run it: a console to watch, alerts to triage, a policy to maintain. A twelve-person company has none of those, and a serious incident can threaten the business itself. What is missing is not awareness (owners know) but anything that works without an operator.

Who lives with itOwner-managed firms and their one technical person · the larger customers whose supply chain runs through them · insurers pricing cyber cover

Why nowAn ENISA survey of small and medium enterprises, carried out during the pandemic, found that around nine in ten expected serious harm to their business within a week of a cyber incident and that over half believed it would likely end the business, against a backdrop of low security budgets and a lack of in-house cyber skills.

Why it matters · the JudgeAn existential risk to the firms that make up the overwhelming majority of businesses, where the binding constraint is operator time rather than money or intent. Security that needs nobody to watch it is a different product from the one being sold.

Inspired by reporting from ENISA (European Union Agency for Cybersecurity)

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Ed. 1

WorkProblem 0010

We can now say with some precision which occupations generative AI reaches first, how that varies by country, and that the exposure falls hardest on clerical and administrative work done mostly by women. What does not exist is the other half: a route from an exposed role into an adjacent one that uses the same accumulated judgment. Retraining is too often offered as courses unrelated to what the person already knows how to do.

Who lives with itClerical, administrative and business support workers · employers holding the institutional knowledge in those roles · public employment services

Why nowThe ILO finds 29% of female-dominated occupations carry exposure to generative AI against 16% of male-dominated ones, with exposure reaching around 41% of jobs in high-income countries versus 11% in low-income ones, and women more exposed than men in 88% of the countries analysed.

Why it matters · the JudgeThe measurement is done and the response is missing, which is an unusually clear place to build. Mapping what an exposed role actually contains onto roles needing those same capabilities is a matching problem, and matching problems are tractable.

Inspired by reporting from International Labour Organization

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Ed. 1

Public sectorProblem 0013

Benefits, banking, health records and school places are moving to interfaces that begin by asking you to prove who you are online. Hundreds of millions of people cannot prove who they are at all, and billions more have no digital means of doing it, so each service added to the digital channel quietly removes itself from the people who most need it, while the statistics record improved efficiency.

Who lives with itPeople without foundational or digital ID · agencies moving services online · the frontline staff handling every exception by hand

Why nowWorld Bank ID4D data puts around 800 million people without official proof of identity and about 2.8 billion without an online digital ID, improving from 3.3 billion in 2021, with the steepest barriers still falling on women, rural populations and poorer households.

Why it matters · the JudgeDigitising a service without a route for people who cannot authenticate does not reduce the work, it moves it to an exception queue nobody resourced. Tools that let agencies serve people who cannot authenticate online (assisted verification, trusted intermediaries, alternative credentials) are unglamorous, needed at scale, and a place a focused team can start.

Inspired by reporting from World Bank ID4D

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Ed. 1

HealthProblem 0005

Resistance is as much a data problem as a drug problem. Surveillance depends on cultures, and much of the world's prescribing happens where there is no microbiology laboratory within reach, so the clinician makes a reasonable guess, and what happens next is rarely recorded anywhere that would improve the next one. The map of what still works is drawn from the minority of cases that reach a lab.

Who lives with itPrescribers in primary and rural care · national AMR programmes · hospital pharmacy and stewardship teams

Why nowThe WHO's 2025 global surveillance report draws on more than 23 million confirmed cases reported by 104 countries across 93 combinations of infection type, pathogen and antibiotic: the most complete picture yet assembled, and still one built from where testing exists rather than where prescribing happens.

Why it matters · the JudgeThe feedback loop that would slow resistance is broken at its cheapest point: capture. Anything that makes empirical prescribing legible without requiring a laboratory improves the map for everyone, and most of what is sold here is tests rather than information.

Inspired by reporting from World Health Organization

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Ed. 1

EducationProblem 0011

Most institutions are writing or planning a policy about AI; few have changed what they actually measure. The essay, the problem set and the report were proxies for thinking that worked only while producing them was expensive. That assumption is gone. Detection tools are unreliable enough to risk accusing the wrong students, and much of what is graded no longer shows reliably what a student understands.

Who lives with itTeachers and lecturers redesigning assessment alone · students wrongly suspected · institutions whose credentials depend on the answer

Why nowA UNESCO survey found 19% of higher education institutions had formal AI guidance with a further 42% developing it, while more than half reported uncertainty about how to apply AI pedagogically and one in four had already encountered ethical problems including authorship disputes.

Why it matters · the JudgeThe question has moved from catching misuse to evidencing learning, and nothing is built for the new question. Making a student's reasoning visible, cheaply and without treating them as a suspect, solves what detection never could.

Inspired by reporting from UNESCO

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Ed. 1

FinanceProblem 0018

Insurers are withdrawing from places where people still live and still owe money. The mortgage requires cover; the cover depends on a risk model that has stopped holding. Homeowners find out at renewal, with weeks to replace a policy that may not exist at any price, and often no accepted way to show an insurer the work they have done to make the building safer, because that evidence is rarely collected in a form an underwriter will accept.

Who lives with itHomeowners in high-risk areas · mortgage lenders and brokers · local authorities watching values move

Why nowIn January 2025 the US Treasury's Federal Insurance Office, drawing on over 330 insurers and 246 million policies, found non-renewal rates in the highest climate-risk ZIP codes running about 80% above the lowest, with premiums averaging 82% higher.

Why it matters · the JudgeNobody owns the gap between the loan and the policy, and the one thing that would narrow it (verified, property-level evidence of risk reduction) is what neither side routinely collects.

Inspired by reporting from U.S. Department of the Treasury

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Ed. 1

FoodProblem 0015

Loss happens at the handovers: field to packer, packer to distributor, distributor to shelf. Every party measures only its own side of each one. So each set of numbers looks defensible while the total is enormous, and the interventions that would work are precisely the ones nobody can see, because they sit between two businesses rather than inside one.

Who lives with itGrowers and packers · distributors and independent retailers · redistribution charities working the same corridors

Why nowFAO estimates that 13.3% of the world's food was lost in 2023 after harvest and before retail, on farms and in transport, storage, wholesale and processing, up slightly from 13.0% in 2015 when global monitoring began.

Why it matters · the JudgeMeasurement at the handover is the wedge, and it is cheap: the produce is already photographed, weighed and scanned on both sides of every transfer. Nobody is joining those records, because each side owns only its own.

Inspired by reporting from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

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Ed. 1

EnergyProblem 0003

Training runs, batch inference and analytics are scheduled around deadlines and cluster availability, almost never around what electricity costs or emits at that hour. Much of this work is genuinely movable, a few hours either way or a different region entirely, but the information needed to move it lives in a different system from the scheduler, and in most organisations nothing joins them. So flexible load behaves like inflexible load.

Who lives with itPlatform and infrastructure teams · sustainability leads with compute in their inventory · grid operators courting flexible demand

Why nowThe IEA's April 2025 Energy and AI report puts data centre electricity use at around 415 TWh in 2024, about 1.5% of global consumption, and projects roughly a doubling by 2030 with accelerated servers accounting for almost half the increase: a load growing fast and, unusually for industrial demand, substantially time- and place-shiftable.

Why it matters · the JudgeA large and rapidly growing load is being treated as though it had no flexibility, when a meaningful share of it does. Making compute schedulable against grid signals is a software problem sitting between two industries that do not yet share a vocabulary.

Inspired by reporting from International Energy Agency

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Ed. 1

LogisticsProblem 0014

Recycling a device profitably depends on knowing what it contains before you open it, and that information was never attached to it. So the pile is handled as undifferentiated waste: shredded for the few metals that survive the process, or stored, or exported. The materials the world is anxious about securing are sitting in it, and a large part of the reason they are not recovered is identification rather than chemistry.

Who lives with itRecyclers and refurbishers · manufacturers facing take-back obligations · anyone sourcing critical minerals

Why nowThe ITU and UNITAR Global E-waste Monitor 2024 recorded 62 million tonnes generated in 2022 with 22.3% formally collected and recycled, around $62 billion of recoverable materials embedded in it, and a projection to 82 million tonnes by 2030 as recycling falls further behind.

Why it matters · the JudgeA known, growing, geographically concentrated pile of valuable material where the binding constraint is knowing what is in each unit. That is a data and vision problem attached to an existing physical industry, a good place for a small team to start.

Inspired by reporting from ITU & UNITAR

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Ed. 1

CitiesProblem 0016

Utilities meter at the treatment works and at the customer's tap, and only coarsely in between: a district meter can say how much went missing across a whole area, not where. So loss is known as a percentage far more often than as a place, the response is scheduled rather than targeted (mains replaced by age, not by evidence), and too many leaks are found only when the road subsides or somebody rings.

Who lives with itWater utilities and municipal engineers · households in intermittent-supply cities · regulators setting loss targets

Why nowA widely cited World Bank estimate, published in 2018, puts the water utilities produce but never bill, through physical leaks and commercial losses, at around 126 billion cubic metres a year, nearly $40 billion in lost value.

Why it matters · the JudgeThe cheapest new water available anywhere is the water already treated, already paid for, and lost before it arrives. Turning a percentage into a location is most of the job, and it is an instrumentation and inference problem rather than a civil engineering one.

Inspired by reporting from World Bank

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Ed. 1

HealthProblem 0019

Caring for an ageing parent means medications, appointments, home visits, bills and forms, shared between siblings in different cities and often different countries. It runs on a group chat, a shared folder and whoever remembers. Things fall through, one person quietly carries most of it, and the professionals involved each see a fragment of a picture nobody holds whole.

Who lives with itAdult children caring for parents · home-care workers · family doctors seeing only their slice

Why nowPopulations are ageing across high-income countries and many middle-income ones while the paid care workforce is not growing with them, so more of this coordination falls to families who were never set up to do it.

Why it matters · the JudgeThis is coordination, exactly what software is good at, and the tools built for it have yet to become the way families actually run it. The work is already being done; it is simply being done badly, by people with no tools and no training, at one of the hardest times of their lives.

Framed by Ainna editorial

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Ed. 1

Enterprise AIProblem 0020

Support has been largely automated, and for routine questions that is an improvement. The unusual case is where it breaks: a bereavement, a billing error, a locked account, a situation the script has no branch for. The customer loops, rephrases, tries again, and eventually gives up, and the company never learns it happened, because a failed escape is rarely a metric anyone collects.

Who lives with itCustomers in genuinely unusual situations · the few remaining human agents · support leaders flying blind

Why nowAutomated support is now the default first line almost everywhere, while the escalation path behind it has often been thinned.

Why it matters · the JudgeThe savings are measured precisely and the losses are invisible entirely, which is why the balance keeps tipping the wrong way. Detecting the moment a conversation has stopped working is a narrow, concrete capability, and whoever builds it is selling the missing half of every deployment.

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Ed. 1

CitiesProblem 0021

"Accessible" on a listing might mean a ramp, or one step, or a lift that has been broken for a month, or a toilet being used as a storeroom. The most reliable account usually comes from another disabled person who has actually been there. That knowledge exists in enormous quantity, scattered across forums, group chats and reviews, and the maps and guides that gather it cover only part of it, each in its own terms, so it is rarely there to check before leaving the house.

Who lives with itWheelchair users and people with limited mobility · blind, deaf and neurodivergent travellers and people with hidden disabilities · carers planning a trip · venues that are accessible and cannot prove it

Why nowAccessibility information is still largely self-declared by the venue, with no shared definition of what the word covers and little route for correction when it is wrong.

Why it matters · the JudgeA sharply defined information gap with a motivated community already producing the data for free. Structure is most of the product, and the people who need it are the people best placed to build it.

Framed by Ainna editorial

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Ed. 1

LogisticsProblem 0024

A small importer commits to an order months before it lands and discovers the real cost on arrival: duties applied differently than expected, a classification disputed, fees that were never quoted. Large firms keep trade teams and brokers for exactly this. A five-person business has a spreadsheet and a guess, and prices a whole catalogue on that guess.

Who lives with itSmall e-commerce brands and independent retailers · the freight forwarders serving them · their customers, eventually

Why nowTariff regimes have become materially more changeable, and the tooling that absorbs that volatility is still mostly built and priced for larger firms.

Why it matters · the JudgeVolatility is now the normal condition rather than the exception, and the answer is still priced for companies that do not need it most. A landed-cost figure a small owner can actually trust is a product, not a feature.

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Ed. 1

EnergyProblem 0025

The first mass-market electric cars are reaching the end of their first ownership with batteries that have years of useful service left. Battery-health reports exist, but no grade is yet trusted by buyers, insurers and second-life users alike, so buyers discount heavily to cover what they cannot see, insurers guess, and packs that would work well in a home or on a grid for another decade are recycled early or not moved at all.

Who lives with itUsed-car buyers and dealers · fleet operators disposing of vehicles · home and grid storage developers

Why nowThe first large cohort of mass-market electric vehicles is coming off its original ownership now, and the second-life market that should absorb those packs still lacks a grade it can commonly trade on.

Why it matters · the JudgeA structural gap with a clock on it: every month without a credible grade destroys value that cannot be recovered later. A battery grade anyone can verify unlocks a market that currently struggles to form.

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Ed. 1

WorkProblem 0026

A small business with roles to fill competes on the same job boards as employers with recruitment teams, brand recognition and budget, and loses. Meanwhile capable people a few streets away never see the role, or see it and do not recognise themselves in the wording. Both sides are present, willing and unable to locate one another.

Who lives with itOwners of trades, care and hospitality businesses · local jobseekers and career changers · the boards that serve neither well

Why nowHiring has concentrated onto national platforms optimised for volume and for employers who can pay to be seen, which is the opposite of what a local employer with two vacancies needs.

Why it matters · the JudgeThis is a matching failure rather than a shortage, and matching failures are solvable. Local, skills-first matching remains underbuilt because the large platforms are built for a different customer.

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Ed. 1

Public sectorProblem 0022

Local government publishes its decisions (planning, licensing, budgets, minutes) and publishing is where the obligation stops. They arrive as scanned documents with inconsistent names, in systems searchable only if you already know what you are looking for. A decision that changes a street is technically public and practically private.

Who lives with itResidents and neighbourhood groups · local reporters · small developers and community organisations

Why nowLocal newsrooms have continued to close in many markets, removing the layer that used to read these documents on everyone else's behalf.

Why it matters · the JudgeThe information is already public, already funded and already digital. Making it findable is a data problem rather than a political one, which is why it is tractable, and why it keeps falling between mandates.

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