Molly Melching first came to Senegal from Illinois in 1974 to study French. She never left. In her early days as a Peace Corps volunteer, she set up a centre for street children and established the first children’s radio programme to be broadcast in the neglected national languages. Despite the fact that French is the official language in Senegal, it is only understood by 1-2% of women. After years of observing development and education programmes falter due to poor communication with local communities, Melching set up Tostan, a foundation dedicated to community-led education and sustainable development. Tostan means "breakthrough" in the west African language of Wolof and over the last 20 years, it has engaged more than 220,000 people, in 22 local languages across eight African countries. Melching’s ability to immerse herself in a community and earn the respect of its members has enabled her to encourage dialogue about female genital cutting (FGC), a practice with a long history in West Africa. Tostan’s approach is not to confront but to work with shared moral norms and present communities with the facts. As a result of Tostan’s work, 6,236 villages across West Africa have publicly abandoned FGC. The government has now woven Melching’s model into a National Action Plan to end FGC in Senegal by 2015.

Kelvin Mwikya spent his nights as a young adult on the floor of Industrial Area Remand Prison in Nairobi. Within a space designed to house 800, 3,000 inmates lay packed against one another. Denied the most basic necessities, the prisoners were quick to realise the value of a stack of donated bibles, from which torn out pages could be used as toilet paper. In this way, Mwikya came across a torn page, which told the story of a master encouraged to receive his errant slave back as a brother. The story defied the devastating stigma and isolation that prisoners and ex-offenders faced. This was Mwikya’s first introduction to restorative justice. On leaving prison in 2002, he founded the Philemon Foundation which began to address the basic hygiene and nutrition needs of inmates, while offering practical support as ex-offenders tried to reintegrate back into society. Through vocational training and the establishment of halfway houses, the reoffending rates plummeted among those involved in the programme. His model of support has been so successful that the government has asked Mwikya to help roll it out across Kenya’s 97 prisons as part of a nationwide penal reform. He is working closely with the government but has refused their offer to expunge his record, realising that it is his status as an ex-offender that gains the trust of prisoners and proves to the communities that a positive future is possible for Kenya’s 50,000 convicts.

A Pakistani-American who focuses on Islam and women's empowerment, Sameena Nazir stands at the modern crossroads of the human rights movement. Her journeys between the two countries brought home the increasing restrictions and challenges facing women in Pakistan, particularly in the marginalised rural regions and those areas affected by recurrent natural disasters. In 2003 she founded the Potohar Organisation for Development Advocacy in the Punjab region, which provided creative training and skills development to girls who were unable to continue into high school education. Handicrafts produced through the workshops are sold though an online store that brings fair trade goods to a global market. This generates much-needed funding and promotes the role that the women play in the economy of their communities. The training also offers a simple, unconfrontational space to discuss issues of rights and protection with other women. In rural areas, Nazir has built strong relationships with and between women farmers, advocating for their inclusion in local and national agricultural departments up and down the country. Through the strength of these networks, PODA was well placed to support those hit by the 2005 earthquake and the 2010 floods that displaced so many and left thousands of women widowed or as the sole carer of their children. Armed with this experience, Nazir has spent time lobbying ministerial offices and played a key role in the development of the Charter for the Rights of Women in Disaster Situation.

Despite his 40 years of work in civil society development and trade justice, Renwick Rose is not a globally recognised name. Yet, among the small farming communities of the Windward Islands in the Caribbean, he is a celebrated figurehead affectionately known as the “Banana Man”. In the 1990s, Rose spotted the value and necessity of organisation and cooperation at a time when the banana trade was entering a downwards spiral. He earned the trust of small-scale farmers who were struggling to make it onto the supermarket shelves and guided them through the process of Fair Trade Certification. The establishment of the Windward Island National Farmers’ Network Association (WINFA) has generated security and progress which radiates out into the wider community. Through their partnership with Fair Trade, the WINFA farmers earn a premium of a dollar for each box of bananas, which is invested democratically back into the community. In this way, the social, educational and trade infrastructure of the islands has begun to bloom. Rose’s attempt at retirement in 2010 was thwarted by the devastating impact of the hurricane that destroyed farms across St Lucia and St Vincent. He returned immediately to lead the farming community on the uphill slope towards recovery, and, with his support, Windward Island bananas were back on the supermarket shelves within eight months.

Mechai Viravaidya was born to a Scottish mother and a Thai father – a background which has given him an interesting perspective on Thailand’s struggle with HIV. The taboo around any discussion of sexual health or family planning has long hindered progress in tackling the spread of HIV or population growth. However, it was into this highly conservative public sphere that Viravaidya launched a national awareness programme so effective and so driven by his unique sense of humour and public policy that it has earned him the title of Thailand’s “Condom King”. His organisation, the Population and Community Development Association, set up in 1974, drew a firm line between poverty alleviation and reproductive rights; today it is one of Thailand’s largest NGOs. But it is the personal quirks of Viravaidya’s approach that have caught the imagination of the public. The launch of his restaurant - called Cabbages and Condoms - gave him both a means of sustainable income and a relaxed space in which to trigger debate around family planning. In a city-wide project billed as Cops and Rubbers, Viravaidya mobilised the Bangkok police force into distributing condoms to the public. But beyond the puns, these initiatives have contributed to an 80% drop in new cases of HIV between 1991 and 1994 and a major reduction in the average birth rate. Now in his 70s, Viravaidya is expanding his focus to rural educational reform in the hope of creating a new generation of honest, empowered leaders.