This morning, I was thinking about sunflowers. We planted some of them in the back garden a few years ago, and they keep returning, in smaller numbers, even though we don’t plant them. It reminded me of a story I read more than a decade ago, about a youth reform group in Kibera, just outside Nairobi. They had decided to clear an area of rubbish, and plant a garden, and they planted sunflowers to leach chemicals out of the soil.

Their project attracted a lot of attention at the time, and I was wondering how that garden was doing, or if it still exists, a decade later. And in turn, that got me to thinking about some of the stories that never get written up – ones that are just as powerful in terms of creating change, but not ones you’d find on the internet.