Awards

Alpha Sennon of WHYFARM in Trinidad and Tobago, along with Wainella Isaacs, Candace Charles-Sennon, Luke Smith, George Caesar, Akinola Sennon and their partners at TECH4Agri, will engage young people, who are the future feeders of 2050, in agriculture, and develop their knowledge and skills so that they can promote sustainable agriculture and improve food security in Trinidad and Tobago. They will implement four related projects in which participants can win cash prizes. These projects include an eight-week training course for ten professionals aged 18 to 30 that provides mentorship and skills to help develop their business plans, tours of ten primary schools with a local youth theater production company to teach nine to eleven year olds about the nutritional and economic value of baigan (eggplant), including a competition to design their own superheroes and nutritious snacks, and focusing their Agricultural Fun, Museum and Food Factory Park for the under 30's to teach visitors about food and local agricultural products using educational games. They will evaluate each project using surveys and metrics such as numbers of participants and related activity on social media.

Lucy Kathuri-Ogola of Kenyatta University in Kenya will train young people to be outreach youth champions to support local smallholder farming households with low food security in Kenya by teaching them new agricultural practices and building financial and social support networks. They will develop a mobile phone application and training platform and test their approach in selected rural and urban areas in Kenya where many smallholder farming families rely heavily on food relief. Sixteen young people who are leaving university will be recruited as outreach youth champions and intensively trained over three weeks on best agricultural practices, and financial and support services such as farmer saving groups. The trained youths will then each go back into their own communities and work with ten households to improve overall social and economic status. They will use surveys to evaluate the effect of their approach on food security.

Alizée Lozac'hmeur of Makesense in Paris will develop online mobile and web applications and provide opportunities to engage with experts and funders as part of a tailor-made approach to help young people learn about and solve the health and social issues that matter to them. They will integrate their digital platform, where participants can register their details and issue of interest, with a project database and events calendar to promote collaborations. Users will receive inspiration and advice and be informed of relevant opportunities by frequent emails or mobile phone messages to help them reach their goals. They will integrate the digital services, build a network of community organizers, and launch a marketing strategy to test their approach in France for engaging young people who are interested in solving a specific UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG).

Eric Dawson of Peace First Inc. in the U.S. will develop a digital platform that provides tools, online mentors, resources, and funding to help young people aged between 13 and 25 in the Middle East solve critical issues in their communities. Their Youth Challenge Platform approach has already shown initial success for over a hundred projects proposed and run by international youth in the U.S. They will adapt their platform for the Middle East by including different languages and tools, particularly to foster cross-cultural collaborations. They will partner with youth organizations in five to 10 Middle Eastern countries and recruit 50 teams of young people who are interested in solving problems related to the UN sustainable development goals. These teams will be supported through the platform to help them design and implement innovative solutions. Surveys and interviews will be used to evaluate the success of their approach in this region.

Rimjhim Aggarwal of Arizona State University in the U.S. will use a digital learning platform and teaching network to teach young people how to create 360-degree spherical imagery of field sites that function as virtual field trips to share their experiences about specific UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and better engage and teach others. These virtual field trips can be distributed on the internet, giving a large number of viewers the sense of actually being in the field, and are thus valuable teaching tools. However, they require specialized skills and equipment to create them. They will teach young people how to make them by holding a workshop to train 20 honors and undergraduate university students to create three new virtual field trips for local SDGs. These will then be presented to other students as part of a university course via a digital learning platform to evaluate their impact.

Anna Casalme of Novelly in the U.S. will develop a mobile phone application that combines young adult fiction about social issues with learning tasks and international discussion forums to encourage young people to become global citizens and spark their interest in issues such as gender equality and health. Building on their existing program, they will design and develop the application with specific features, add one novel, and pilot test it, before refining the design and opening it to the public. After three months, they will evaluate their approach by collecting user data such as number of users, their reading progress, and participation in discussion groups.

Hussein Khalil of the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil will provide young people in urban slums with knowledge and tools to identify elements that promote the spread of diseases by rats and mosquitos such as dengue and Zika virus infection, and engage their communities to help combat those diseases. They will recruit 40 young residents from two urban slums to test their approach. The youth will be taught to map rat- and mosquito-infested areas and identify possible causes, such as poor waste disposal, by photographing their environments, and to use tools to track rat movements and insect breeding. They will also use gamification methods to stimulate learning and promote collaborations between the youth and adult residents to identify the most effective interventions. Once simple solutions have been identified, the youth will help to implement them in their community and produce and share progress reports using online and offline tools.