People and Planet

Cherrie Atilano is an agriculture educator, farmer, and the founder and CEO of Agrea - a mission-driven farmer-first business launched in 2014 in the Philippines. Its mission is zero hunger, zero waste and zero insufficiency. And at the core of her vision is creating a system that dignifies and aims to eradicate poverty for farming and fishing families in the Philippines through capacity building and a farm school.

During ...

Noura Al-Neyadi is an Emirati documentary photographer whose passion for using powerful imagery to tell stories has taken her all over the world, including the North Pole. Her latest project is Eye Stories. At the height of the pandemic, Noura documented the heroic journey of 148 frontline healthcare workers, zooming in only on their eyes. For over three weeks, she visited five COVID-19 testing tents in Al-Ain and Abu-Dhabi and wit...

Nisreen ElSaim has made it her life’s mission to champion climate action, on behalf of those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. She has managed to blend two worlds - those of youth-led grassroots movements and high-level policy dialogue - and as  the chair of the UN Secretary General's Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change, has been turning heads with her powerful speeches.

During Climate and Biodiversit...

Yusuf Omar has made it his life’s mission to promote storytelling as a vehicle for change, and to mobilize communities across the globe to shape their own narrative. After an accomplished career in journalism, Yusuf was disillusioned with traditional media. He felt the urge to innovate, and so he decided to co-found his own media initiative with his wife, Soumaya. They co-founded Hashtag Our Stories — a media company th...

Richard Thanki, economist and computer scientist, has centered his tech startup Jangala around the question: how do we extend internet access to vulnerable populations? . Jangala, a UK based charity, enables internet access for people in need of urgent humanitarian aid, especially refugees.

Jangala was featured during Expo 2020 Dubai's Travel and Connectivity Week, where Richard - as a child of refugees from Uganda - spoke about h...

Where do we learn - beyond the four walls of a classroom? Well, Judit Polgar believes it is the black and white checkered board, with kings, knights, and queens.

Born in 1967, Budapest, Hungary, Judit grew up playing chess with her three other sisters and family from the age of four. At the age of 15, Judit became the youngest to achieve the title of Grandmaster in chess. 

In this episode, we hear how the onl...

What if art was used for good, as a means to create a smarter and more holistic society? Faouzi Khlifi, also known as “eL Seed”,  grew up in a modest social class in Paris, his father worked at a car factory and his mother was a nanny. Art wasn’t a part of his life, he just loved to draw. 

Today, eL Seed is best known for fusing Arabic calligraphy with graffiti to paint colorful, swirling messag...

Kennedy Odede grew up in Kenya's Kibera slum, where he experienced first hand the devastating realities of life in extreme poverty. His experience led him to launch Shining Hope for Communities, or SHOFCO, an organization that impacts over 2.4 million slum dwellers across 17 urban slums in Kenya. Today Kennedy is one of Africa’s best-known community organizers and social entrepreneurs. 

Kennedy is also one of th...

Growing up in London in the 1970s, Dr. Maggie Aderin-Pocock always felt like she didn’t fit in. Space became her escape, she was fascinated by its limitless possibilities. Today, she is one of the leading space scientists and educators in the UK. 

Dr. Aderin-Pocock is also the host of Space Week, at Expo’s Programme for People and Planet. For most people, the idea of space can feel remote, or even irrelevant, but ...

What does our planet’s future look like? Changemakers from all over the world break down what it’ll take from all of us to create a sustainable future for our planet.

Episodes release every other Monday starting on November 22, 2021. Subscribe to People and Planet on your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss an episode

This podcast is by Expo 2020 Dubai’s Programme for People and Planet, and produced by ...