Good Morning!

Happy to have you here for another edition of Good News! :)

Today we're looking at a conservation breakthrough off the Tanzanian coast, a country-wide effort to get millions of children reading and writing properly, and a global dataset that tracks one of the most important human welfare trends of the last century.

Grab your coffee, and let's get into it! ☕️

If you watched my 30x30 video, you might remember the line I kept coming back to:

Drawing a boundary on a map doesn’t protect anything.

This week I found a story that proves it.

Quick recap for anyone who missed it. In 2022, almost every country on Earth agreed to protect 30% of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030. On the ocean side, we only just crossed 10%. Real progress, but still a long way to go. So every new marine protected area counts!

Let’s head to Pemba Island, off the coast of Tanzania.

A few years ago, fishermen in the village of Tumbe started coming home with almost nothing. And it didn’t get better. So they did something you wouldn’t expect. They went to their government and asked for a protected area. Yes, the fishers asked for fishing limits.

Not everyone was convinced. Some asked, “Where will we get food?” Fair question. But they had seen what happened on the other side of their own island. A protected area set up there in 2005 brought the fish back. That won most of them over.

Fast forward: more than 20 communities, the Tanzanian government and a few conservation groups designed two new MPAs together. They became official this summer and cover 1,300 km² of coral reefs, mangroves and seagrass.

The best part: The fishers run it. They patrol the no-take zones, close areas during spawning season and banned the nets that wreck coral. Since then, patrols are up more than 50% and illegal activity is down about 45%.

Is 1,300 km² going to get us to 30x30? No.

In the video we saw French Polynesia protect an area bigger than the EU. Pemba is tiny next to that. But it shows the other half of the puzzle: protection that actually sticks.

Haven’t seen the video yet? Watch it here:
How the World is Quietly Protecting 30% of the Planet

Learning to read is one of the most foundational skills a child can learn, and it unlocks all the others. Math, science, history, even just finding your way around the world on your own.

Yet across much of the developing world, millions of children sit in classrooms without ever fully grasping how to read or write in their own language. In Egypt, where Arabic literacy has historically been uneven across regions and income levels, this has been a persistent challenge.

Egypt decided to tackle that head on. Its national Arabic literacy programme has now worked with 1.38 million primary school kids across all 27 of the country’s regions.

The focus is simple: reading fluency and writing in the first school years. That’s the window that matters most. Get it right early, and the benefits tend to compound. Miss the window, and catching up becomes significantly harder.

So does it work? UNICEF checked.

They studied the first phase, which ran in 980 schools. Before the programme, 33% of kids scored zero on the literacy test. Not low. Zero. Afterwards? Just 1.7%. On average, kids gained about 6 points on a 60-point scale.

Now, a new partnership will bring this program to 2,500 more schools, reaching up to one million more children. And who knows, maybe a few of them will be reading this newsletter one day!

If you were to ask most people whether the world is becoming a better place for children, many would be skeptical.

The news cycle doesn’t make it easy to feel optimistic. But when you zoom out and look at the data, one trend stands out as extraordinary: child mortality has fallen dramatically in every single region of the world since 1950.

In 1950, almost 1 in 4 children worldwide died before their fifth birthday. Today, that figure has dropped to under 1 in 25.

That’s not a rounding error. It’s one of the biggest improvements in human welfare ever recorded. And it hasn’t happened in just a handful of wealthy countries. The decline spans Africa, Asia, Latin America, Oceania and beyond. Every region. No exceptions.

The drivers behind this are many and connected. Vaccines against diseases like measles, polio and diphtheria have saved tens of millions of lives. Better nutrition, clean water, sanitation and basic healthcare have all played a role. Oral rehydration therapy alone, a simple mix of salt and sugar dissolved in water, is estimated to have saved millions of children from dying of diarrhea.

Progress has slowed in some regions and challenges absolutely remain, especially in lower-income countries. But this long-run trend is real. The world has gotten so much better at keeping children alive!

Yep. You read that right haha.

Last Sunday I took on the biggest sports challenge of my life: running a marathon on the Great Wall of China. And I did it together with 5 friends, which made it a lot more fun (and a little less painful) 😅

This is one of the hardest marathons in the world. Over 5,000 stone steps. More than 2,000 meters of elevation gain. Some steps are knee-high, some are crumbling, and none of them are the same size. Which is probably why only 86 runners signed up for this one…

The day started very early.

Buses left Beijing at 5:30 in the morning to bring all the runners to the Wall, and the race started at 8 AM. The course is in the mountains of northwest Beijing, and in late October that means crisp air and autumn colors everywhere.

Average temperatures that time of year sit around 10°C, which honestly was a gift. You get a 10-hour time limit to finish, and trust me, that number starts to make a lot of sense around the second climb.

My favorite moment was when my friends and I reached the top of the Wall for the first time. There was literally nobody else in sight. Just us, the mountains, and the Wall stretching out in both directions. One of the most famous places on Earth, and for a few minutes it was all ours. I’ll never forget that!

Then came the stairs. And more stairs. And somehow even more stairs. After 5 hours and 58 minutes, I crossed the finish line with legs that had completely given up on me.

You might be wondering… why would anyone want to do this?

I love doing these crazy things for a few reasons.

First, it shows me what the human body is actually capable of. A challenge that once seemed impossible now feels doable. Which tells me our limits are probably much further away than we think.

And second, honestly? Sidequests like this are what life is all about for me. Expect more of this from me in the future!

So here’s my challenge for you: what’s your Great Wall? It doesn’t have to be a marathon. Just something that feels a little too big right now.

Our Sources:

Alright, that's it for this edition!

A protected ocean, over a million kids learning to read, and a long-term global trend that quietly represents one of humanity's greatest achievements.

I hope it leaves you feeling a little lighter.

See you next time,
Freddy 🌻

Feel free to share some feedback!