Here’s our eclectic list of ten innovative solutions to social, economic and political problems around the globe, drawing from our Signature series reporting, as well as other sources.

View our slideshow of the top ten choices:

Politics:

Rwanda – The small East African nation is the only country in the world with a female majority in parliament — women hold 56 percent of parliamentary seats.

The political rise of women is partly due to the country’s electoral quota (at least 30 percent female) and is also a consequence of male deaths during the country’s 1994 genocide.

Still, Rwandan voters have elected women in numbers well beyond the mandates dictated by the post-genocide constitution. And though women in Rwanda still face discrimination, female legislators have influenced major reforms in banking and property laws.

Worldfocus special correspondent Martin Seemungal spoke to some of the powerful women in Rwanda who are guiding the country through a long process of reconciliation, including Aloysie Cyanzaire, chief justice of Rwanda’s Supreme Court.

Iran — This was the decade that social media grew up. Activists in countries around the world — from Ukraine and Moldova to Madagascar –  used Internet-based communications to amplify their political protests.

While some commentators take issue with the now well-worn term, “Twitter Revolution,” there is no doubt that the opposition movement in Iran has used social media to take political dissent to a new level.

After authorities expelled or incapacitated foreign media in the aftermath of the disputed presidential elections of June 2009, words and pictures shared via Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook became the go-to sources for news about the Iranian opposition’s “green” movement.

Technology:

Estonia — The tiny Baltic nation of Estonia has embraced the digital age. It boasts hundreds of free public internet access points, and all Estonian schools are connected to the Internet.

Online phone service Skype grew up in Estonia’s capital, Tallinn. Citizens can vote online, and they access official documents, bank accounts and public transportation with national identity cards.

Worldfocus anchor Daljit Dhaliwal and producers Sally Garner and Ara Ayer reported on E-Stonia in the spring of 2009.

Israel — Because of its small size and urgent need to reduce its dependence on foreign oil, Israel may be the perfect incubator for a concept that still seems very futuristic — the electric car.

Headed by Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi, the company Better Place has installed thousands of electric charging stations around the country. Worldfocus special correspondent Michael Greenspan and producers Yuval Lion and Ara Ayer reported on the progress of the electric car in Israel earlier this year.

Environment:

Denmark — Long before Copenhagen, the Scandinavian nation had made huge advances in energy efficiency.

In the last 20 years, the Danish economy has grown 78 percent even while its energy usage has remained constant and its carbon emissions reduced. The country has also become a net exporter of energy; wind alone has created 30,000 new jobs.

Special correspondent John Larson reported on the Danish miracle in our Worldfocus series “Green Energy in Denmark.”

Guyana – This year, Guyana’s President Bharrat Jagdeo proposed a low-carbon development strategy that compensates the nation for conserving its rainforests, which make up about 80% of the land.

It is likely to be the test-case for the U.N. plan to reduce deforestation worldwide.

Economy:

Brazil – Building on the success of similar programs in Mexico, Brazil has implemented a strategy aimed at curbing poverty and promoting education.

The Bolsa Familia provides more than 11 million impoverished families with a stipend, in return for guarantees that families will send their children to school.

Since its inception in 2003, the poverty rate in Brazil has fallen from 34% to 22%, according to government statistics.

Bangladesh — In 2006, the Nobel Committee awarded the Grameen Bank and founder Muhammad Yunus the Nobel Peace Prize — a sign of the widespread acceptance of microfinance as a means of combating poverty.

As a group of economics professors summarized: “Microcredit is undoubtedly the most visible innovation in anti-poverty policy in the last half century.”

Health:

Bhutan — The former king of the tiny mountain kingdom of Bhutan pioneered the concept of gross national happiness. The idea has spread, and Bhutan continues to inspire other countries.

Last year, the government of Bhutan adopted a new Constitution, which mandates that government programs be evaluated based on the happiness that they foster.

Senegal – An innovative grassroots initiative begun in Senegal to combat female genital mutilation has spread to other African nations.

The NGO Tostan uses a community empowerment model and and now encompasses work on health, human rights, and democracy.

More than 4,000 villages in Senegal have made public declarations against female genital mutilation and child marriage.

Bhutanese refugees at the Beldangi 2 camp in Nepal.

Though they fled or were forced out of Bhutan more than 18 years ago, Bhutan’s ethnic Nepalis have yet to return.

Altogether, more than 103,000 people of ethnic Nepali origin in Bhutan left that country in the 1990s after new citizenship laws were implemented. Many ended up in sparse refugee camps in Nepal.

The Bhutanese government says the majority of the refugees were illegal immigrants.

In the past few years, several thousands of refugees have resettled in the West — but thousands more still remain in the Nepalese camps. 

Don Duncan is a freelance print and radio reporter and videographer who has reported from Afghanistan, France, Bhutan, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Nepal, Spain and the United States.  He writes at World Politics Review about the situation of Bhutan’s ethnic Nepalese minority.

Bhutan’s Radicalized Refugees

When Matimya Moktan, 41, saw her husband Manbahadur standing unannounced in their doorway after a nine-year absence in prison, her heart sank.

“I was sad to see him back here again,” said Matimya, one of more than 100,000 Bhutanese refugees living in United Nations-administered camps in eastern Nepal. “I had hoped I would see him again in Bhutan, but his standing back in our doorway meant we may never get back there,” she adds, seated in the corner of the family’s dark wattle-and-daub hut in the Beldangi I refugee camp, five kilometers outside the Nepalese town of Damak.

Manbahadur returned following nine years spent in a Bhutanese prison for having illegally re-entered the country and staging a protest demanding the return to Bhutan of his people, Bhutan’s ethnic Nepalese minority that was expelled in 1991.

Sandwiched between Communist China and largely Hindu India, tiny Buddhist Bhutan, with its population of a mere 600,000, has been given to fits of ethnic and cultural protectionism throughout its history. An impressive necklace of cliff-perched fortresses — or Dzongs — that dot the country’s mountainous perimeter testify to past efforts.

By the 1980s, when the ethnic Nepalese bloc mushroomed to represent one third of the kingdom’s population, Bhutan responded with a “one nation, one people” policy that at once bolstered the majority Drukpa culture by mandating its traditional dress and language for all, and restricted the rights of the ethnic Nepalese population. After a series of civil rights protests by the ethnic Nepalese, many of whom were Bhutanese citizens, the state clamped down — hard.

“We left because we were scared that they would imprison us, that they would beat us, that I would be raped,” Matimya told World Politics Review. In the weeks leading up to her family’s departure from Bhutan in 1991, she says, the army had begun to take women away from their houses.

This was just one tactic in what human rights groups say was a widespread campaign of ethnic cleansing of a minority population that claims to have arrived in Bhutan as early as the mid-1800s. Other tactics, say the refugees, included torture, beatings and the destruction of property.

But in today’s Bhutan, which in March made the transition from a century of absolute monarchy to become the world’s newest democracy, another narrative prevails.

“Deep inside, they know they never belonged to this country,” says Bhutanese Prime Minister Dorjee Y Thinley in his office in Bhutan’s capital Thimphu. What is labeled elsewhere as an ethnic cleansing of Bhutanese citizens is seen in Bhutan as the “regularization” of an illegal immigration problem that had been left unbridled for decades. “They are refugees not of Bhutan, but of the ecological degradation, political upheavals, economic deprivation and insecurity in Nepal,” Thinley says, referring to Nepal’s 10-year civil war that ended in 2006.

For almost two decades, the fate of these refugees has been suspended between these two versions of events.

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Photo courtesy of Flickr user Katrine Syppli under a Creative Commons license.