The Progress Network

The Country Making Orphanages Obsolete Moldova has seen the number of children living in institutional care drop from 17,000 to 700. By 2027, the goal is to have none.

Read all about it: reasonstobecheerful.world/moldova-maki...

🤔How did the number of kids in Moldova’s orphanages drop from 17,000 in 2000 to just around 400 today?

Genetically modified pig liver keeps man alive until human organ transplant First time the procedure has been performed on a living person.

😮For the first time, a man with liver failure was kept alive by being be surgically connected to a genetically modified pig liver.

🩸The organ filtered the man’s blood for a few days while he waited for a human liver transplant.

👏The man has since received a human liver and is recovering well.

Large tortoiseshell butterfly confirmed no longer extinct in UK Early spring sightings show colourful insect is a resident species for first time in decades, says conservation charity

☹️In the 1960s, the large tortoiseshell butterfly went extinct in the UK due to the loss of elm trees due Dutch elm disease.

😮But that is no longer the case!

🦋@savebutterflies.bsky.social has declared the large tortoiseshell to be no longer extinct and a resident species in the UK.

A record share of U.S. workers now have access to paid leave There’s still no federal paid leave policy in the United States, but 14 laws now extend coverage to an estimated 46 million people.

🤔What kind of laws?

👉CO expanded its paid leave program to include an additional 12 weeks for parents of babies in the neonatal intensive care unit.

👉In OR, survivors of domestic violence also qualify for paid leave.

👉CT offers paid leave if you’re serving as an organ or bone marrow donor.

💸🤒The Daily Dose via @19thnews.org 💸🤒

There’s still no federal paid leave policy in the United States.

However since 2002, 14 states have passed paid leave laws that cover an estimated 46 million people.

Indonesia will ban social media for children under 16, communication minister says Indonesia will ban social media for children under 16, the communication and digital affairs minister says.

🇮🇩Indonesia will ban social media for kids under the age of 16 beginning on March 28th.

🌏They are the first nation in Southeast Asia to do so.

Denmark becomes first country in the European Union to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis The World Health Organization (WHO) has certified Denmark for the elimination of mother-to-child transmission (EMTCT) of HIV and syphilis, recognizing the country's sustained commitment to ensuring ev...

🤔How did they do it?

🏥High coverage of prenatal testing and treatment for pregnant women.

www.who.int/news/item/27...

🇩🇰The Daily Dose via @who.int 🇩🇰

Denmark has become the 23rd country in the world to eliminate the transmission of HIV and syphilis from mother to child.

Everyone gets canceled sooner or later You may as well just stir the pot.

"If you write about issues in the news, you’re going to end up on the wrong side of a cancellation pile-on sooner or later, and you just shouldn’t worry about it too much," writes TPN member @mattyglesias.bsky.social.

www.slowboring.com/p/everyone-g...

Mississippi’s education miracle: A model for global literacy reform The state, once ranked near the bottom of education standings, dramatically improved student literacy rates while using little money.

Read all about it:

How did America's poorest state, Mississippi go from being ranked 49th in the nation for reading to 9th between 2013 and 2024?

LLMs Are Antithetical to Writing and Humanity The big brains gone wild have come bearing gifts again. Should we accept them?

"The big brains gone wild have come bearing gifts again, this time in the form of general-purpose large language models," writes TPN associate editor, Brian Leli.

"Where will the incipient use of LLMs as tools for writing and engaging with the human condition and experience lead us?"

😎3 Things That Went Right this Week😎

🇮🇩Indonesia banned elephant rides nationwide.

🇬🇧A baby boy is the first in the UK to be born from a womb donated by a dead person.

🇻🇳Vietnam is the first in Southeast Asia to pass an AI law.

theprogressnetwork.org/murder-rate-...

Keeping women on the sidelines of the economy isn’t simply unjust—it’s self-defeating Closing legal and institutional gaps in women’s economic rights is essential for accelerating growth, boosting productivity, and ensuring no economy leaves half its potential untapped.

🤔What kind of reforms?

🚓Governments strengthened protections against violence

🤰Expanded parental leave

🍼Raised childcare standards

💰Guaranteed equal pay

🤝Removed restrictions on women’s employment

blogs.worldbank.org/en/voices/ke...

💼🌍The Daily Dose via World Bank 🌍💼

Since 2023, 68 countries have enacted reforms to expand women's economic opportunities.

It’s 2028. AI Has Made You Much Happier. The viral Citrini memo warned that artificial intelligence would crash the economy. But what if it does the opposite, freeing us from drudgery and inviting a return to meaning?

"The viral Citrini memo warned that artificial intelligence would crash the economy. But what if it does the opposite, freeing us from drudgery and inviting a return to meaning?" writes TPN member Arthur Brooks.

The World Is Much Less Murderous We're literally aging out of killing one another.

🔪This week in our newsletter What Could Go Right? we are talking about how the world is much less murderous than it used to be.

Africa primed for solar breakthrough after record capacity growth The continent of Africa looks set to emerge as a key driver of global solar power production over the rest of the 2020s thanks to a potent mix of policy support, rapid economic growth and declining co...

🤔Which countries are growing the fastest?

🇿🇦South Africa, followed by Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.

www.reuters.com/markets/comm...

🌍☀️The Daily Dose via @reuters.com 🌍☀️

There was a 54% year-on-year increase in solar installations in Africa in 2025.

📉Teenage pregnancies in the US have fallen by 70% since 2007.

🤔Researchers are not sure about the cause of the actual decline.

📚Theories include a combination of better access to more effective contraception, less sex, and better sex education.

🤓This is our guess.

Boys can read The massive gender gap here is starting to get some of the attention it deserves

"If we truly want to boost reading scores, we better start with the boys," writes TPN member @richardreeves.bsky.social.

ofboysandmen.substack.com/p/boys-can-r...

🧐What about the rest of the country?

📉Early deaths from fine particulates in Poland fell by 18% between 2005 and 2022, the latest data shows, and across the EU they plunged by 45%.

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

🤔Is there more good news?

👏Yes, the report also said there were 17% fewer cases of asthma and 28% fewer cases of allergic rhinitis in children in 2018 than in 2008.

🇵🇱🫁The Daily Dose via @theguardian.com 🫁🇵🇱

In 2013, Kraków announced that they would ban coal and wood in home heating.

A decade later, nearly 6,000 early deaths have been averted in the city, according to the European Clean Air Centre.

🤔Who did it first?

🇳🇱The Netherlands

🧐Who has done it most recently?

🥳In 2025, Thailand and Liechtenstein joined the party.

ourworldindata.org/data-insight...

💍🏳️‍🌈The Daily Dose via @ourworldindata.org 🏳️‍🌈💍

Since 2001, 39 countries have legalized same-sex marriage.

LLMs Are Antithetical to Writing and Humanity The big brains gone wild have come bearing gifts again. Should we accept them?

"When all is said and done, I maintain a general, long-term optimism about humanity maintaining its innate revulsion to these dehumanizing things and environments that we seem unable to stop constructing for ourselves," writes TPN associate editor Brian Leli about LLMs.

About a third of UN member countries have ever had a woman leader Women are currently the head of government in 13 of the 193 member countries of the United Nations.

🤔Which year had the biggest increase?

😮2010, when women led for the first time in five countries: Australia, Costa Rica, Kyrgyzstan, Slovakia, and Trinidad and Tobago.

🤨How about last year?

🇯🇵Japan, Namibia and Suriname all elected women for the first time as their head of government.

🌎Of the 193 UN member countries, 63 have had a woman leader.

🧐Who had the first?

🇱🇰Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, where Sirimavo Bandaranaike began her first term as prime minister in 1960.