The Caribbean has the tools to rebuild its reefs as coastal defence, from 3D-printed tiles to biorock. The financing gap is now the regional challenge.

University of Dhaka Vice-Chancellor Obaidul Islam wants artificial intelligence built for Bangladesh’s own problems, not imported wholesale. A small campus robotics lab already backed by an international funder shows what that could look like, if the money follows.

Africa receives about a quarter of the climate finance it needs each year. Kenya Climate Innovation Centre has spent 14 years incubating more than 3,500 climate enterprises, has opened that pipeline to outside investors through its new Founders Collective, and is raising $55 million to expand from three countries to at least 10 by 2030.

The world is short of 4.76 million cybersecurity professionals, and Kazakhstan’s reported cybercrime losses rose 29-fold in a year. SDU University in Almaty Region built the first university course with Cloudflare to train defenders on the systems attackers target, and offers educational courses to relevant fields in the industry.

The University of Ilorin is developing a 200-hectare Science, Technology and Innovation Park on its campus in Kwara State, inside an area it designates as a free trade zone, and is asking companies to set up factories and research operations there. Partners gain access to the university’s research base, including 52 patents, and to a campus of more than 70,000 students.

Cutaneous leishmaniasis scars close to 1 million people a year, and the dressings used to treat the open wounds it leaves have lagged behind the drugs used to treat the infection itself. A team at the University of Mauritius has built a new one out of sugarcane fibre, the country’s oldest industrial waste product.

Coastal communities in Fiji and Vanuatu have read weather, protected coastlines, and managed fisheries through knowledge passed down for generations, none of it written down. A University of Fiji study spent eight months recording it before it disappears, and found one village already facing the choice climate change is about to force on many more.

Climate change is pushing Zimbabwe’s conventional crop value chains toward failure across all five of the country’s agroecological regions. Marondera University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology is betting on vegetables that grew wild for generations, now bred, seeded, and sold back through a farmer network 430 strong.

A faulty imported prosthetic can cost an amputee $2,000 to replace. A South African university lab and a British charity’s pilot in the Gambia are both now producing custom-fitted replacements, printed from a patient’s own scan, for a fraction of that.