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Someone regulated has to say yes, or data has to be bought, or the thing only matters at a scale evenings cannot reach. Years, and worth them.

9 problems · all 20 on the Index

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 Most of the capacity that enters the queue is eventually withdrawn, often after years of waiting.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of more than five years, and about three quarters of the capacity that requested connection between 2000 and 2020 later withdrawn.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

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

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

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

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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