Kolkata, India

Photographer: Sudipto Das

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Mohd Alamgir, 61, dreams of the day when everyone in his home neighbourhood of Darpara can read. That day may not be far off. Thanks in good part to his work over three and a half decades, nine out of ten people in this century-old slum district of central Kolkata are literate, and 8% of its school students, mostly girls, are going on to graduate from universities. Mohd began his career as a school teacher at a government-run school in 1981, straight after completing a law degree. He has remained there ever since, concentrating in particular on teaching girls. A literate mother, he says, will never leave her children uneducated.

Little Rann of Kutch, India

Photographer: Prabha Jayesh

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Little Rann of Kutch, an area of salt marsh in western India’s Gujarat state, is renowned among photographers and tourists for its picturesque white landscapes. But for those who live there, life is hard. In summer, temperatures rise as high as 49 degrees Celsius. In winter, they drop to zero. Scattered across this barren landscape are seventeen schools. Funded by the Gujarat government, attendance is free for their four hundred students. But their facilities are minimal: no electricity, no benches; even drinking water is hard to come by. Finding staff for them is a challenge. Few teachers want to work in such a remote area for a monthly salary of 4,500 rupees (about US$65).

Prabha Jayesh's photo-story won first place in our worldwide open call for submissions.

Olafsfjorour, Iceland

Photographer: Deanna Ng

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Lara Stefánsdóttir is principal of Menntaskólinn á Tröllaskaga, a junior college in the northern Icelandic town of Olafsfjorour. She took up her post six years ago, just after rules were introduced giving schools enormous freedom to design their own curriculums. That change, however, was also a challenge. “In a small town, most students don’t finish school. Most either become sailors or marry one. You can earn a million or two kronas going out to sea. So why bother with education?” Her answer was to help students figure out why staying on at school could give them more options for their future and allow them to stay and maintain their roots in the town. “The school builds the community and in return, the community helps build the school,” she says. Atli Tómasson has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, a chronic condition that makes it hard for him to sustain attention. Before Lara became Menntaskólinn á Tröllaskaga’s principal, he was constantly dropping in and out of school. He finally graduated after Lara worked with him, trying out different classes to find out what he liked and was good at. He is now a fine art student at university.

Gyöngyöspata, Hungary

Photographer: Zoltán Balogh

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

In a family home in northern Hungary’s Gyöngyöspata region, a group of young Roma gather to play a board game based on logic. The evening’s activity is organised by Careamic, a childdevelopment project set up by a group of four volunteers from Budapest – university student Dávid Miklós, mathematician Pál Galicza, consultant Ágnes Pletser and ceramicist Éva Hámori – to expand extra-curricular activities for Roma children. To fund their scheme, the Careamic team have also founded a social enterprise that works with the children’s parents to make and sell ceramic products.

Hong Kong, China

Photographer: Xaume Olleros

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Hong Kong, one of the world’s most densely populated cities, imports more than 90% of its total food supply. But recent food scandals, and worries about over-dependence on products grown on large-scale commercial farms, are pushing up demand for healthier and more nutritious produce. Helping fill a tiny part of this demand is Rooftop Republic, a social enterprise whose aim is to advance urban farming by establishing and maintaining organic farm set-ups around Hong Kong. At workshops run on rooftops across the city, Hong Kongers Michelle Hong and Andrew Tsui, and Pol Fabrega from Spain, the team behind Rooftop Republic, use Cantonese and English to show urban dwellers how to grow their own food at home. In a city where eating is central to social life, such knowledge is vital to help urban dwellers connect with the skills and knowledge needed to build sustainable and local food systems. 

Chinacla, Honduras

Photographer: Andrea Borgarello

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

In Arenales, a community in the town of Chinacla in central Honduras, parents are testing new ways of combining child care, nutrition, stimulation and learning for young children. Their goal is to help their children reach their full development potential by paying special attention to what they do and eat during their most important developmental years, the first two years of life. As part of the programme, launched by the Honduran government with World Bank support in 2007, staff assess each child individually, establishing his or her specific needs. Community volunteers then help parents figure out how to apply the findings of these assessments with regular family visits. The programme emphasises how parents and other caregivers can take care of the emotional and physical needs of their children, playing and talking with them, and exposing them to words, numbers and ideas as they go about their everyday activities.

Jeremie, Haiti

Photographer: Gary George

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

In 2013, Chancely started feeding and teaching children in Jeremie, his hometown in south-west Haiti. Three years later, he gives classes and meals to around 2,000 children each month. Born and raised in Sou Platon, one of Jeremie’s poorest neighbourhoods, Chancely began by handing out half a bag of rice to hungry children. Today, he buys the food he distributes with money collected in the United States and passed to him weekly by an American living in Haiti. His students, all under 12, are from the town’s poorest families – those who can’t even afford to pay for the books, uniforms and materials needed to go to public school. Whenever he has any spare time, Chancely studies. Now in his mid-twenties, the coming school year will be his last in high school. In his classes, held twice a week on open lots or makeshift classrooms in temporary venues, he passes on what he has learned to his students.

Guatemala City, Guatemala

Photographer: Giles Clarke

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

By day, Jorge is a cardiothoracic surgeon. By night, he is Guatemala City’s sole mobile doctor with the Bomberos Voluntarios, the city’s volunteer paramedic service. On quiet evenings, Jorge trains his colleagues in emergency medical treatment. But quiet evenings are rare. More often, the Bomberos Voluntarios’ thirteen teams spend their time rushing from one emergency to the next along Guatemala City’s gang-ridden streets. Jorge studied medicine in Guatemala before spending two spells living in the United States. There, in addition to working as a doctor, he also trained as a firefighter. In 2012, he returned to Guatemala to become head of the cardiovascular department in a military hospital – and help bring a little emergency relief to Guatemala City’s mean streets.

Accra, Ghana

Photographer: Sélim Harbi

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

In a classroom at Accra University, Jacqueline wears a queen mask from the Baule, a people who three hundred years ago moved from what is now western Ghana to what is now central Côte d’Ivoire.

Jacqueline Nsiah, 32, is a language teacher, arts curator and pan-Africanist. After studying media anthropology at Berlin’s Frei University, Jacqueline lived in Brazil for two years before returning to Ghana to teach Portuguese at Accra University. In 2014, she curated the first edition of the Uhuru African Film Festival in Rio de Janeiro. Today, she curates film and educational events, exhibitions and concerts in Accra. One of the themes running through her work is connecting the history of the two continents on either side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Wendland, Germany

Photographer: Chris Grodotzki

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Locals and refugees collect apples for a “Willkommenstrunk” (“Welcome Drink”) party. Money made selling juice from their harvest will help fund language courses, meeting places and social events.

In Wendland, a district in northern Germany, residents refuse to follow the rise of xenophobia taking place across much of Europe. Instead, they welcome the arrival of refugees with open arms. Here, people organise welcome celebrations, offer free language courses and other workshops, share their sports clubs and put on shows in theatres and community centres for the newcomers to their district. Some people host refugees in their own homes, others engage in cultural exchange projects where they introduce the new arrivals to the culture and customs of their country life. Twice a week, local teachers offer free German lessons and tutoring for refugee children. Wendland is not a well-off place. With a population that is declining, its economy is stagnating. But rather than seeing this as a reason to shut its doors to outsiders, villagers hope new arrivals can help them revive the local area. Refuge Wendland, a group set up to support migrants, is demanding the resettlement of 10,001 refugees to the district of 49,000. It plans to set up a new multicultural village. While Germany and most other European countries debate ways of restricting refugee arrivals, the people of Wendland want to turn today’s refugees into tomorrow’s neighbours. Not only are they teaching their new residents German, they are also teaching the rest of Germany and Europe a lesson in how to welcome and treat people.

Boraba, Gambia

Photographer: Bente Marei Stachowske

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition

Sainey Jobarteh, 35, is a griot. He travels from village to village with his kora, a twenty-one-stringed instrument with a long wooden neck and a soundbox made from half a calabash covered with cow skin. Every evening, when people gather after work, he sings and plays for them. Often he’s an entertainer bringing laughter to his audience. But sometimes he’s a historian, telling them about their families and traditions. Or perhaps he’s a mediator, settling disputes. Or maybe a one-person broadcaster bringing news and information from other places. Now, he says, he’s working on a song about how terrorism has changed the world. Sainey was born into a griot family in the village of Boraba in inland Gambia. His father was his teacher. He plays his father’s kora – decorated with a crescent moon and a five-pointed star, a symbol of spirituality, and with a hole on one side where people can put in money. One by one, he sings to the people around him. Everyone he singles out for attention has to give him something: if not money, then maybe food or a bed for the night.

Strasbourg, France

Photographer: Anne Milloux

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

In the last twelve years, more than 8,000 children have sung with Alfonso Nsangu-Cornu’s Gospel Kids Choir at concerts across France. Alfonso arrived in France in 1989 at the age of six, fleeing war in his home country, Angola. He first experienced gospel music as a teenager when he joined a choir in Strasbourg. Aer leaving school, he had a brief career as a mechanic before switching to become a full-time youth worker. In 2003, he combined his love of working with children with his passion for music in a series of extracurricular singing classes held at a local school. Their success paved the way for Alfonso to set up Gospel Kids Choir the following year. Since then, Alfonso has brought together children from different neighbourhoods, social backgrounds and cultures to sing gospel, African and French songs at a total of nearly 500 concerts.

Debere Berhan, Ethiopia

Photographer: Lukas Berger

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Members of Teklu’s circus give an open-air show on a street in Debere Berhan.

Teklu relaxes in a local bar.

Teklu Ashagir, 35, runs Circus Debere Berhan, one of Ethiopia’s few circuses and a home from home for fifty young performers. Teklu grew up in Addis Ababa in a middle class family. After leaving school he worked as a dancer, theatre director and writer. A friend of his founded the circus in 1998. He took it over in 2003. From its base in Debere Berhan, a city in central Ethiopia, the circus travels across the country. Funded mainly by performances, it gives shows wherever it can find a suitable theatre, hall or street. Its performers, aged from five to thirty, are almost all from poor families. A few are paid, but most have joined to learn acrobatics, juggling and other circus skills from Teklu and the circus’s five other trainers.

Deir el-Bersha, Egypt

Photographer: Claudia Wiens

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Mariam teaches a literacy class for women at Deir el-Bersha, a tiny, mainly Coptic Christian village in rural Upper Egypt. Her students are all recipients of micro-loans – sums of money just big enough to let them launch a small business. In Deir el-Bersha, people have traditionally lived from farming or fishing in the Nile. But with the micro-loans, these women are finding other ways of supporting themselves. One used her money to buy a water buffalo to rent to farmers for field work. Another bought the material and needles needed to make fishing nets. Another started a business producing sieves used in cheese-making. As well as improving their standard of living, the income from their enterprises also brings with it greater independence. More and more of these women are choosing to send their children, especially their girls, to school, using some of their earnings to pay for text books and other learning materials.

Zumbahua, Ecuador

Photographer: Annie Griffiths

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

At a school in Zumbahua, children take a Spanish class. As in many village schools across the Ecuadorean Andes, their teacher trained at El Quiron University in Quito, the country’s capital, taking a course in teaching Spanish to children who only speak the language of their own community. While native languages are respected in Ecuador, children who do not learn Spanish find themselves with limited opportunities to attend secondary school or college. As bilingual adults, they will have greater career opportunities. And if they go on to university, they can also return to their native communities and help teach Ecuador’s official national language to another generation of children.

Goma, DR Congo

Photographer: Marco Gualazzini

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Akilimali Saleh, 15, is a journalist for Radio Comico FM, a radio station serving the Islamic community of Goma, a city in Democratic Republic of the Congo’s North Kivu province, on the country’s eastern border with Uganda and Rwanda. Where he comes from, many other teenage boys fight in armed groups, live on the street or work in the fields. He presents a radio programme called “Paroles Sur Les Enfants” (Words on children), in which he promotes children’s rights and denounces violations of these rights. Goma lies at the centre of ongoing fighting between its inhabitants – mostly Hutus – and Tutsi, backed by Rwanda. Some people have fled Goma. Others fight. Most are resigned to what fate brings them. Akilimali belongs to none of these categories. Instead he speaks out, condemning child labour and the recruitment of adolescents as fighters, and telling stories about Goma’s child prostitutes and drug addicts.

Skive, Denmark

Photographer: Marianne Borowiec

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Johan Laigaard runs a forest kindergarten in Skive, a town in north-west Denmark. Here, children run free outside every day, regardless of the weather. On windy days, the children make kites from plastic bags tied to lengths of string. On trips through the forest, Johan shows them how to observe the environment with all their senses. As the children play, Johan stays in the background. How high should they climb a tree? To the point where they can still get down without the help of an adult. Left to their own devices, the children learn to take care of each other.

Prague, Czech Republic

Photographer: Hynek Glos

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Šimon Ornest is the founder of The Tap Tap, a group of musicians and performers drawn from Prague’s Jedličkův Institute, an institution set up in 1913 to look after children with physical disabilities. Šimon, 42, formed The Tap Tap in 1998, soon after he joined Jedličkův as an educator. What began as a way of using music as a form of therapy has since grown into a major force in Czech show-business, playing at venues such as the Czech National Theatre and touring to international events in cities across Europe, from London to Moscow. The group plays both its own compositions and famous songs by others. It has made videos, put on plays and rappelled in wheelchairs from Prague’s Nusle Bridge.

Havana, Cuba

Photographer: Rebekah Bowman

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Psychoballet was first developed to rehabilitate teenagers and youths with behavioural disorders. Since the 1990s, its techniques have also been applied to young people with physical disabilities.

A new generation of young students outside Cuba’s national ballet school.

In Cuba, ballet is not just for an elite few. Since 1959, the year when Fidel Castro came to power in the Cuban revolution, the country’s national ballet school, known since 2015 as National Ballet School “Fernando Alonso”, has brought ballet culture to a broad audience with popular, inexpensive performances. Its classes are free and enrolment is open to all. But the national ballet school is not the only place in Cuba that sees ballet as being of public benefit. Since 1972, “Psychoballet”, an expressive therapy that uses classical ballet as a tool for corrective treatment, has been used to rehabilitate people with a wide range of special needs. Psychoballet was created after Cuban psychologist Georgina Fariñas and the Department of Psychiatry at Angel Hospital Arturo Aballít in Havana asked the Cuban National Ballet to see if it could come up with ways of using classical dance to treat a group of aggressive children who hadn’t responded to the usual therapies and medicines. The programme which emerged, focused on exploring the dynamics that exist between movement and emotion, has proved enormously successful, helping the rehabilitation of more than 20,000 people in Cuba and many others in countries in Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe.

Rebekah Bowman's photo-story won third place in our worldwide open call for submissions.

Cres, Croatia

Photographer: Petar KÜRSCHNER

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Vesna Jakic runs Ruta, an association that preserves the social, cultural and ecological identity of Cres, an island on Croatia’s Adriatic coast with a history of habitation dating back to the Paleolithic era two-and-a-half million years ago. Vesna teaches children about the island’s myths, cras and customs. On trips to the forest of Tramuntana on the northern end of the island, the children learn how to make elves’ hats using felt made with wool from the island’s sheep. Although Cres is one of Croatia’s biggest islands, 65 kilometres long and with an area of 400 square kilometres, only just over 3,000 people live there. In recent decades, many people have le the island for the Croatian mainland in search of work. Today, much of what was farming land is overgrown, while a growing wild boar population is threatening Cres’s island’s sheep by killing their lambs.