In 2000, the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals set out to eliminate poverty, reduce child mortality, achieve universal primary education and improve maternal health in 15 years. In 2005, the award-winning photojournalist Nick Danziger began to document the lives of women and children in eight countries around the world. Would the Goals succeed in giving them a better life? Or would they turn out to be just another PR exercise ­unfeasible targets with impossible aims? Beginning in 2014, Nick accompanied by best selling author Rory MacLean, will retrace his steps to discover what happened to those individuals, and to tell their extraordinary stories of sacrifice, bravery and hope. The stories will leave no one unmoved; some of the women and children have died through sickness and poverty, another has become the biggest entrepreneur her town has ever known. Nick is now seeking a sponsor or sponsors to complete the third of the project's three journeys, to publish a catalogue and to mount a touring exhibition, with a launch date to coincide with the UN General Assembly in September 2015. Above all this project will provide profound, personal insight into how co-operation between local and international communities can irrevocably change lives for the better.

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. In this TEDxIUM talk, photojournalist and filmmaker Nick Danziger talks about how small items could have drastically changed people's lives and opened opportunties. How school materials such as notebooks could have changed a girl's future.