Palmares, Costa Rica

Photographer: Mónica Quesada Cordero

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Stars of the Countryside was one of the first Mother-Teacher kindergartens in Costa Rica. Like its counterparts in villages across Panama and Honduras, as well as providing a place where young children play and learn, it also encourages mothers to teach and learn from each other by swapping experiences and know-how. Set up in a village in Palmares, a canton in the south of the country, Stars of the Countryside meets twice a week. Over a meal, its mothers discuss child development, how women can empower themselves and the importance of the right to an education for themselves as well as their children. The organisation behind the kindergartens is Madres Maestras (Mothers Teachers), a Catholic non-profit founded in Panama in 1971. Its motto, “Toda Madre es Maestra” (Every mother is a teacher), adorns the front of tee-shirts handed out to children in Stars of the Countryside.

Antioquia, Colombia

Photographer: Oscar B Castillo

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Astrid Elena, 28, works as an instructor teaching first aid, emergency resuscitation and medical evacuation techniques to groups of young deminers in the mountains of north-west Colombia’s Antioquia Department. A trained nurse, she prefers working outside to being inside a hospital in her native city of Medellín, Antioquia’s capital, despite the risk of having to walk across land strewn with landmines. Landmines and other improvised anti-personnel explosive devices are a scourge for Colombians living in rural areas across the country. Antioquia has suffered more than any other department, with 2,500 victims since 2010. The demining programme and Astrid’s first aid courses are organised by UK-based HALO Trust, a charity whose mission is removing landmines and other dangerous detritus left behind by war

Darchen, China

Photographer: Samuel Zuder

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition)

Tseten Dorjee (above) is headmaster of the Tibetan Medical and Astro Institute in Darchen, a village in western Tibet, one of the world’s poorest and most remote regions. Since the mid-1990s Tseten has taught traditional Tibetan medicine, astrology, nutrition, ethics and language to young Tibetans. Some of his graduates have stayed on to work at the institute, but most have returned to their home villages to look after basic health care in rural communities. His institute stands at the foot of Mount Kailash, a holy site for Tibetan Buddhists. As well as training students, its staff also take care of the health problems suffered by pilgrims visiting the area, the most common of which is altitude sickness caused by Darchen’s location 4,575 metres above sea level.

Bixiang, China

Photographer: Liu Junyang

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

In Bixiang, a Miao village in south-west China’s Guizhou province, homes are built using a set of practices handed on from one generation to the next. On a day deemed auspicious for construction, work starts as soon as Yang Dinghong’s neighbours and other members of his village arrive to help him. They begin by setting the building’s alignment, then they lay the building’s foundations – a framework of logs raised half a metre or so above the ground. Next comes putting up the four parallel walls that divide the house’s interior into three rooms. The room between the second and the third of these walls is the house’s living room – the “zhengtang”. When the zhengtang’s walls are in place, a pig is dragged into the room and killed. Some of its blood is sprinkled over the house’s foundations and pillars. The last big task is putting up the building’s sustaining walls. When they are in place, the builders take a break to eat a meal of rice and chicken. Much work remains finishing and decorating Dinghong’s house. But with its basic structure completed, fireworks are set off and guests from local villages arrive bearing gifts. Bixiang has a new home.

Panguipulli, Chile

Photographer: Pablo Izquierdo

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Former forestry engineer Rafael shows a group of teenage students at People Help People Pullinque Vocational High- School how to prepare seed trays.

Two of Jose Luis’s students explore the underside of a car.

José Luis and Rafael teach teenagers at People Help People Pullinque Vocational High-School in Panguipulli, a city in southern Chile. The school, part of a non-profit educational foundation also called People Help People, serves students from poor rural districts around Panguipulli. The students, nearly all Mapuche – the collective name given to members of various groups of indigenous peoples who lived across southern Chile and Argentina before Europeans invaded five centuries ago – typically start at the school aged 14. Most arrive with no expectations about their future. Neither José Luis nor Rafael trained as teachers. José Luis studied mechanical engineering and Rafael forestry engineering. Both changed vocations to help end the cycle of poverty in which many people around Panguipulli find themselves locked. As well as teaching the usual academic subjects – maths, Spanish, science and so on – José Luis and Rafael also share their technical knowledge with their students, seeking to give them an edge for when they graduate and search for their first jobs.

Surrey, Canada

Photographer: Jen Osborne

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Obi Canuel is a philosopher and religious minister of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a church that emphasises the teaching of tolerance and open mindedness. A religious philosophy major, Obi often wanders the streets of Surrey, a city in western Canada’s British Columbia province, wearing religious robes and a colander. “What’s important is that people take a moment to think about what’s important in life,” he says. Obi draws his inspiration from Socrates, encouraging everyone around him to have fun, challenge conventional wisdom and think about the meaning of life. “Why does religion have to be so serious?” he says. As well as being a religious minister, Obi is a youth mentor, piano teacher and political activist. In 2014, he ran for Surrey’s city council on a platform that included raising awareness of the income gap between ordinary citizens and their political representatives, promising that if elected he would donate two-thirds of his salary to charity. He finished second last out of 35 candidates.

Oddar Meanchey, Cambodia

Photographer: Luke Duggleby

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Buddhist monk Bun Saluth runs Cambodia’s largest community-managed forest, the Rukhavon Monks Community Forest in the country’s northwestern province of Oddar Meanchey. Born into a poor rural farming family, Bun spent his early years training to be a monk and then living in Thailand. There, he spent five years studying the environmental conservation tactics used by Thai monks. He returned to Cambodia determined to protect his country’s forests. At first, people were suspicious of his efforts. But Bun persisted, explaining over and over again the benefits of adopting sustainable ways of managing their woodlands. In 2002, he managed to secure protection for an area of 18,260 hectares, and his community forest was born. Since then, his district has seen little illegal logging or land encroachment by farmers. “Even though more people live in the area, no one breaks the rules any more,” says Bun.

Bani, Burkina Faso

Photographer: Matjaz Krivic

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

For a few days each week, Kadi Cisse, 24, teaches at a school for married women in Bani, a town in northern Burkina Faso. The school is run by Mwangaza-action, an organisation based in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, that helps local communities organise themselves. As an offshoot of this work, Kadi is building a house where she can live with a group of homeless children. She also helps fifty other women from Bani pool money into a fund that pays school and medical fees for children who have lost their parents. To support herself, Kadi runs her own bar, a wooden hut with a concrete floor and a few tables. She sells food she has made to travellers coming from Ouagadougou or miners from the nearby Gangaol gold mine. She has done this kind of work since she was 12, when she first put up a table besides Bani’s main road to serve passers-by.

Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei

Photographer: Muhammad Ilham Ismail

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Kalpana Kishorekumar, 37, is head of humanities at Chung Hwa Middle School in Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital of Brunei, teaching social studies, geography, sociology and modern history to students aged 13-17. Since Kalpana joined the school in 2008, social media and other internet technologies have become crucial educational tools enabling a shift from teacher-centred learning to student-centred learning. For projects, her students work in groups, collaborating with each other using cloud-computing programs, exchanging information and ideas with mobile apps, and gathering data with online surveys. Kalpana uses the same software to follow and review their work. Free communications software allows her and her students to discuss issues ranging from gender equality to information technology problems with other educators and experts in countries ranging from Nigeria to the USA. “I want to make a difference,” says Kalpana. “My students have become more curious and adventurous in trying new things and absorbing as much knowledge as possible. I would love to see my students make a choice, grab a chance and change whatever they can.”

Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Photographer: Ivan Abreu

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition)

Rafael Botelho is a volunteer teacher at Minas Quad Rugby, an educational organisation that uses sport to work with tetraplegics. Based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s sixth largest city, Minas Quad Rugby’s twenty-five members have all either partially or totally lost the use of their torso and limbs, some because of having a degenerative disease, others because of being in vehicle accidents or having been shot. The squad trains every day from Monday to Friday and competes in tournaments across the country. Three of its members were picked to represent Brazil at the 2016 Rio Paralympics. As well as Rafael, who has a master’s degree in adapted physical education, Minas Quad Rugby’s staff includes both sports trainers and psychologists. All its staff have worked for free since the team lost its main sponsor as a result of the economic crisis which struck Brazil in 2015.

Gaborone, Botswana

Photographer: Rebecca Radmore & Elio Peña

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Gaborone-based Flying Mission Services runs a range of air services in Botswana, among them taking eco-tourists on charter flights to the north of the country and running a non-profit air ambulance service for the Ministry of Health. It also runs a fully licensed aircraft repair facility and – to staff that facility – an aircraft maintenance training programme, Flying Mission Services Aircraft Maintenance Engineering Training School. In 2013, Keneilwe Budani, after completing a two-year course, became the school’s first female graduate. Now 26, she works at Gaborone’s Sir Seretse Khama International Airport, helping to keep Flying Missions Service’s fleet of aircraft in the air.

Visoko, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Photographer: Jasmin Brutus

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

As well as teaching, Fra Ivan oversees his school’s 60,000-book library and curates its collection of fossils, minerals and other natural specimens.

“I am not for tolerance between the religions,” says Fra Ivan, “I am for love. Tolerance means that you are merely tolerating the others’ presence.”

Fra Ivan teaches Latin and Croatian in a school run by Franciscan monks in Visoko, a town of 17,000 people close to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Twenty years ago, it stood on the frontline of fighting between Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats. Today, government-funded and free for all, its students include Muslims and Orthodox Christians as well as Catholics. Now in his mid-40s, Fra Ivan has been with the Franciscan order for twenty years. “Silentium est approbationem – silence is approval,” he tells his pupils. “If you see someone beating a child or a dog and you walk by, you are giving your approval.”

Konani, Bolivia

Photographer: Mateo Caballero

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Luís Alberto Usnayo, 30, teaches mathematics at a public school in Konani, a small town 4,000 metres above sea level in the Bolivian highlands where most people are poor farmers. Almost all of Luís Alberto’s students have to walk several kilometres to and from school. After school, many of them have to help their families, taking care of animals or looking after crops. At school, their main interests are the free breakfast provided by the government and football with their classmates. Getting them interested in maths has always been hard. But the one thing that has worked for Luís Alberto is chess. As a teenager, he had found consolation in the game after his father, a mine worker, died aged just 37. Then, in the years that followed, it opened for him the doors of abstract reasoning and mathematics. It took him a while to find ways to share his love of the game with his students. But gradually he succeeded. Now, Luís Alberto uses chess to introduce ideas such as strategy, timing and opportunity which can then be applied in other subjects such as history and geography. Today, some of his students are taking part in regional chess tournaments. Luis Alberto’s next goal is to have them competing in Bolivia’s national championships.

Minsk, Belarus

Photographer: Alessandro Vincenzi

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

In December 1990, shortly after the collapse of communist rule across Eastern Europe, a series of evening classes were held in the Belarusian capital, Minsk. Taught in Belarusian, and promoting Belarusian culture, those classes were the seeds that two years later led to the founding of the Belarusian Humanities Lyceum. The school was quick to establish itself as one of Belarus’s most prestigious centres of secondary education. In 1994, however, Belarus’s brief era of post-communist liberal rule came to an end with the election of Aleksander Lukashenko as the country’s president. Lukashenko, an advocate of Sovietstyle dictatorial rule, and who is still president, ordered schools to use only Russian-language textbooks. The refusal of the school’s staff to comply marked the start of years of official harassment, culminating in 2003 with an order to close the school. For a while, classes were held in private apartments, then in the basement of a Catholic church. Only in 2005 was the school able to find permanent premises, reopening in a large house on the outskirts of Minsk, where it still operates today, with a dozen teachers and some sixty students.

Chittagong, Bangladesh

Photographer: Mohammad Faqrul Islam

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Every day of the week except Fridays, from half past seven in the morning to nine o’clock in the evening, this bus travels across Chittagong, a coastal city in eastern Bangladesh, giving class after class to children who live on the street or whose parents can’t afford to pay for their education. The bus, bought with donations from the readers of German newspaper Recklinghäuser Zeitung, travels between seven locations, picking up 40 children at a time for an hour or two of primary classes at each stop.

Masazir, Azerbaijan

Photographer: Mila Teshaieva

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Malahat Alieva is a mentor for younger women in Masazir, a municipality of three thousand people in eastern Azerbaijan. Her message: stand up for your rights and follow your dreams. A teacher in a local village school for almost her whole working life, the death of her husband several years ago persuaded her to try something new, and she stood for election to the municipality’s council. That could have been a risky move. Traditionally, women in rural Azerbaijan are discouraged from taking part in public life. Those who do usually find themselves stigmatised by other people, often including their own family. But it worked for Malahat. Despite only receiving support from women, she was elected, and ever since she has been a vocal advocate for women’s interests in Masazir. Asked to describe her outlook, she says, “My grandmother once told me: ‘A room has four corners; if you ever find yourself treated badly, don’t look for the door, just go and sit in another corner.’ I’ve turned that rule on its head. Now I try to help women in any kind of trouble find the door and go through it.”

Ulpanyali, Australia

Photographer: Dean Sewell

Year of Submission: 2016

Louis and three of his students take refuge from the sun in one of the red sandstone caves that flank the edges of Kings Creek in Watarrka National Park in Australia’s Northern Territory.

Louis Clyne lives in the remote indigenous community of Ulpanyali in central Australia’s Western Desert. At 35, he is already considered an elder amongst his people. His custodial responsibilities include passing down the customs, lore and traditions of a people that have existed for more than 40,000 years. His two nephews, Johnny, 13, and Denzel, 14, have travelled 400 kilometres from Alice Springs to visit him. The two boys are approaching the age of initiation and must prove to Louis and the other male elders of Ulpanyali that they have the necessary skills and knowledge to move forward to the next stage of their lives. On an excursion to a sacred watering hole, during story-time in an ancestral cave and on a night hunt for kangaroos, Louis passes on lessons in living, surviving and dream-time to his nephews and other young people. Learning in school classrooms is available to the few children living in this part of the Western Desert. But for Louis, experiencing, understanding and preserving the customs and traditions of his people is what education is really about.

Geghakert, Armenia

Photographer: Jacob Balzani Lööv

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 
 

Felix Aliyev, 76, has spent nearly five decades training young weightlifters at his run-down gym in Geghakert, a village in western Armenia. Trained at Armenia’s Institute of Physical Training, from where he graduated in 1966, his most successful student was Yurik Sarkisyan, a world weight-lifting champion from 1982 to 1984 and former holder of 14 world records who now is deputy head of the Australian Weightlifting Federation. With an Azerbaijani father, Felix was in great danger when fighting broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the early 1990s. Most Azerbaijanis fled the country, but he decided to remain in Geghakert. While the war continued, his Armenian pupils took shifts sleeping in his home to protect him. “I could not move to Azerbaijan, as my wife and my mother are Armenians,” he says. “Had my pupils turned their backs on me I would have left. But they supported me strongly.”

Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, Argentina

Photographer: Ana María Robles

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Colonia Carlos Pellegrini is the only village on the central lagoon of Esteros del Ibera, a wetlands area in north-west Argentina’s Corrientes province best-known for being home to more than three hundred and fifty bird species. Before the 1980s, widespread hunting threatened much of the wetlands’ wildlife. But since 1982, when the area was declared a provincial ecological reserve, many species once at risk of extinction, including alligators and caimans, capybaras, swamp deer, mountain goats and maned wolves, are all recovering. Perez Roque, 42, who was born and has lived his entire life in Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, was once himself a hunter. But in the last two decades he has become one of the staunchest defenders of the wetlands’ protected status. With his two sons he runs a centre dedicated to raising awareness about the importance of preserving biodiversity in the area.

Bamyan, Afghanistan

Photographer: Abdullah Shayagan

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Riding a bicycle carrying a box filled with books, Saber Hussaini travels from village to village in Bamyan, a province in Afghanistan’s central highlands. At every stop, children gather around him. They return books borrowed on his previous visit, then look for something new in his collection to take away this time. Saber’s books are mostly story books. In a part of Afghanistan where most people are more worried about feeding their families than educating them, his main goal is helping children find joy in reading. When it comes to their content, Saber has just two absolute rules: nothing religious, nothing political.