Sometimes the answer is a movement, legislation or simply money.

And sometimes it’s just a person, unique, impudent, brilliant.

Two such cases stood out this week from Latin America, a region that for all its vibrancy, imagination and human capital seems to underperform when it comes to solutions journalism.

From news coverage, for example, we might imagine Peru to be a nation of impoverished children, corrupt institutions and parlous environmental threats.

José Adolfo Quisocala aims to tackle all three, via a bank he has set up for kids. And he’s only 14.

Javier Larragoiti is also taking aim at multiple problems – diabetes, obesity, climate change, farm waste – through some laboratory chemistry that may have reinvented sugar. His dad is more than just proud.

Sugar, sugar … Larragoiti, centre, and team Photograph: Courtesy Xilinat

Good luck to them both.

Meanwhile, many of you continue to write in about GDP, “growth” and progress. So what do you think about New Zealand’s pivot towards wellbeing this week?

Lucky numbers

Circumstances for children have improved in the past two decades in every country worldwide other than Syria, Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago, according to Save the Children, which reckons that 280 million youngsters are better off than their equivalents were in 2000.

What we liked

The latest experiment in guaranteed basic income comes to you from Stockton, California, via Annie Lowrey at the Atlantic.

Also …

1 across. Angry text linked to lower dementia risk (10 letters).

What we heard

One of the issues which really puzzles me is the consequence of automation on purchasing power. I’ve never heard an economist discuss the inherent contradiction with our economy based on consumerism (fancy sports shoes, trips to Dubai, high end cars, luxury baubles) and the ineluctable shift to a world where fewer and fewer earn a comfortable salary. Industrialists want fewer workers and more customers. But consumers are wage earners!

David Leishman, via email

Great article about the substitute sugar. I would like to see something about using/fermenting waste plant material for making alternative fuel and also who’s doing work on harnessing wave energy from the oceans.

Jude Smith, via email

As a Guardian member I would be very interested in positive approaches to cleaning toxic/antibiotic waste from water and how it could be possible to do this at scale. On a related theme of water – as clean water is already a source of war – where are there examples of combining solar power or other sustainable energy sources and using this to assist people to access clean water? Thanks for interesting, positive and important work of the Upside.

Marianne Hughes, via email

Where was the Upside?

Certainly with the Duke of Burgundy, back from the brink.

The butterfly effect. Photograph: Karin Rollett-Vlcek/Getty Images/imageBroker RF

But also with any charity who can secure even a small proportion of MacKenzie Bezos’s $36.6bn fortune.

Thanks for reading. Tell a friend about us. Get in touch with your best ideas, so we can then pretend they are ours. Write to theupside@theguardian.com.