Marrakech, Morocco

Photographer: Ali Chraibi

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Throughout Islam’s long history, mosques have played a dual role as places of learning as well as worship. Today, faqihs – Muslim jurists – continue this tradition in the Marrakech region of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains and other remote areas with few schools. In these places, overcrowded classes and shortages of books mean that regular teachers struggle to give students enough individual attention. Faqihs fill the gap, teaching children to read and write by making them repeat verses from the Quran and then write those verses out with black ink on small wooden boards. The classes are also an important means for teaching Muslim values. In return for teaching their children, villagers support the faqihs with gifts of food and other daily necessities. Sometimes they will also build a classroom and small residence at their local mosque for the faqihs to use.

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Photographer: Sofie Knijff

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

In a backroom near the centre of Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital, Norovsambou trains young girls to become contortionists. Her students are following a long tradition. Since the founding of the Mongolian State Circus in the 1940s, Mongolia has been one of the world’s top sources of contortionists, the best of whom have gone to perform everywhere from Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre to the Monte Carlo International Circus Festival. Norovsambou runs a tough regime. Her students start their training at the age of five. For the next seven years, they practice for at least three hours a day. Only a few will become professionals. Some of them will get injured along the way. Others will lack the necessary mental toughness. Before she took up training, Norovsambou was a top contortionist herself, travelling the world giving performances and winning prizes. As well as her coaching work, she helps students from poor families find sponsors who can pay for their training.

San Cristobal De Las Casas, Mexico

Photographer: Eleani Martínez

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Manolo (standing) is a a multi-instrumentalist. He plays the piano, harp, guitar, trombone and several traditional Mexican instruments.

Manuel Duran Cruz runs the the Musical Creation Programme at El Ingenio, an educational centre for disadvantaged children and youth in San Cristóbal de las Casas, a town in southern Mexico. Manolo, as most people call him, began teaching music when he was in high school. After graduating from university, he moved to Lebanon for two years, running music and arts workshops with displaced migrant youth at cultural centres in Beirut. He then lived in Colombia, helping to organise music projects for young Colombians of African descent. He moved to Chiapas six years ago, and since then has helped more than a thousand people learn musical instruments, write lyrics and make and record their own music.

Chiapas, Mexico

Photographer: Janet Jarman

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Every week, Sergio Castro treats more than a hundred people in his clinic or in their homes in Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest state. He refuses to charge for his work, as he believes that putting economic stress on top of illness hinders healing. Now 75, Sergio moved to Chiapas from northern Mexico more than forty years ago to work as an agronomist and vet. Shocked by the extreme poverty he encountered, he started working with local people, building schools and installing water pipelines, acquiring the basics of first aid and medicine, and learning their languages and customs. Over time, more and more people began seeking him out for advice and treatment. Eventually, Sergio decided to dedicate himself full-time to helping them. Wary of doctors and other medical professionals, many of his patients refuse to visit hospitals for treatment. Instead, they turn to Sergio and his way of combining modern medicine with a sensitivity to local ways. Staff at local hospitals were at first suspicious of Sergio due to his lack of formal training. But many of them now recognise his knowledge and abilities. In recent years, many Mexican and international volunteers have come to work and learn with him, observing and helping out in his clinic and on his daily visits to bedridden patients in their homes.

Bamako, Mali

Photographer: Nicolas Réméné

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Students in a mathematics and computing class at the university. A digital network connects classrooms and computers across the entire university.

Seydou Sylla stands before the entrance to the University of Sahel.

Seydou Sylla is rector of the University of Sahel in Bamako, the capital of Mali. Founded in 2011, the university’s mission is to train young people to feel at home in today’s world of rapid scientific and technological change while maintaining their traditional religious and cultural principles. The university, principally funded by Al Farouk, a Saudi Arabian non-governmental organisation, offers degrees in Islamic studies, Arabic and computing. It plans to add faculties of law, management and medicine. Currently it has around 400 students. Seydou studied engineering at the Islamic University of Medina in Saudi Arabia and has a PhD in Quran studies. As well as his university post, he is also general secretary of the Union of African Muslim Scholars.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Photographer: Nikt Wong

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

June Low is a sex educator in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. In a country where many people regard talking about sex as taboo, her job often has its tricky moments. According to June, Malaysia’s long-standing approach to sex education – focused almost solely on abstinence – has never really been effective. To give teenagers better knowledge about sex, in 2015 June began hosting an internet sex education show. Titled “Popek-Popek” – Malay slang for “talking” – the show, made in the living room of her home, offers a comprehensive view of the options available to young people wondering about sex. “My videos are available online for free, so no one can stop me from reaching young people seeking information,” says June.

Ndjoka, Malawi

Photographer: Bente Marei Stachowske

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Evelyin Chasweka, 14, is president of the children’s parliament in Ndjoka, a village in south-east Malawi. Chosen by children in the village, she and the twenty or so other members of the parliament meet once a week to talk about issues such as unemployment and poverty, teenage pregnancy, HIV/AIDS and child marriage and labour. As they search for ways of tackling the problems their village faces, they learn how to work as members of a group, expressing their opinions and listening to the arguments of others. Once they decide what they want, Evelyin and the other members of her parliament take their demands to their village leaders. The force behind the parliament is Daughters of Mary Immaculate, a charity based in southern India’s Tamil Nadu state. It helps establish child parliaments around the world, believing that when children have knowledge of their rights they can take things into their own hands and change them for the better

Anatananarivo, Madagascar

Photographer: Tolojanahary Ranaivosoa

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Emile performs in Namontana market, a gathering place for farmers wanting to buy and sell agricultural goods on Antananarivo’s outskirts

Emile Ramandimbisoa is a singer, story-teller and performer of hiragasy, the main musical tradition of Madagascar’s central highland regions. Using kabary – speech combining proverbs and stories of daily life – his tales entertain and educate. Sometimes he sings of those who lost everything to HIV-AIDS. Other times he tells of what went wrong when too much forest was felled, or of the headaches caused by corruption and other social problems. Now 56, he first performed hiragasy at 17 in a troupe founded by one of his uncles in a country town just over 80 kilometres from Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital. In 2001, Emile moved his family to Antananarivo and founded his own hiragasy troupe.

Klaipeda, Lithuania

Photographer: Mattia Vacca

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

In the gym of a military base in Klaipėda, a city on Lithuania’s Baltic coast, cadets in their first week of training are shown a video of fighting between pro-Russian rebels and Ukrainian soldiers in south-east Ukraine’s Donbass region. In Lithuania and the two other Baltic states, Latvia and Estonia – all former states of the Soviet Union that are now members of Nato and the EU – many people fear possible Russian aggression. An increase in military activity in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on Lithuania’s western border, prompted the government in Vilnius to resume military conscription. In September 2015, the Lithuanian army started training 3,000 recruits as part of a programme to expand its self-defence forces.

Benghazi, Libya

Photographer: Essam Al-Fetori

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

In the late 1970s, Suleiman Elshwihdi boxed for Libya at tournaments as far away as Venezuela and Nigeria. But in 1980, at the age of twenty, his career came to an end when the country’s then ruler, Muammar Gaddafi, banned the sport. It was only after Gaddafi’s downfall in 2011 that boxing reemerged from the shadows. In his hometown of Benghazi, Suleiman gathered together some old and battered equipment in a makeshift gym and began to train a new generation of fighters. Boxing still has no official support in Libya. To cover the costs of tournaments, young fighters collect donations from relatives and friends. Suleiman’s dream is once again to see Libya’s flag at international boxing tournaments and Libyan boxers winning medals.

Luang Prabang, Laos

Photographer: Michael Sakas

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

At a village in northern Laos, staff from Luang Prabang Public Library and Village Science, a US-based non-governmental organisation, hand out soap and books about hygiene to children. They read the books with older students and do colouring or writing exercises with younger ones. The books have been written by a volunteer at the library and been brought to the village on the library’s Library Boat for Lao Children. The project is one of several the library has done with Village Science delivering books and other learning materials to villages around Luang Prabang.

Chek, Kyrgyzstan

Photographer: Elyor Nematov

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Sixty-year-old Ainysa squats outside her home in Chek, a village in western Kyrgyzstan, with her six-year-old grandson. After the parents of her grandson divorced, like millions of other adults from Central Asia, they both went to work in Russia. For the last few years, her grandson has only seen his mother once a year. He has had no contact with his father. The local government provides Ainysa with almost no support for her grandson. She is one of many grandmothers across Central Asia who have become the main source of learning for a young child.

Seoul, South Korea

Photographer: Habibul Haque

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Seoul-based South Korean lawyer Young Joon Kim is a trustee of Asian University for Women, an independent, international university based in Chittagong, Bangladesh. Founded in 2008, the university’s mission is to educate a new generation of women leaders. It draws its students from around 15 countries across Asia, including Afghanistan, Bhutan, Nepal, Palestine, Sri Lanka, Syria and Vietnam, admitting them solely on the basis of merit, regardless of their family’s income level. As a trustee, Young Joon helps set the university’s policies, offers advice on key strategic decisions and strives to raise its profile around the world. Nearly all of AUW’s students are on full scholarships. Young Joon leads a group of supporters in South Korea, among them Ewha Womans University, the world’s oldest women’s university, and Export-Import Bank of Korea. Young Joon grew up in South Korea in the 1960s and early 1970s before moving with his family to the United States when he was 16. After an undergraduate degree at Yale, he studied law at Harvard Law School. Since graduating, he has worked with the same law firm for 33 years successively in New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong and now Seoul. As well as his work with Asian University for Women, Young Joon mentors young North Koreans who have fled their homeland and are now studying at universities in South Korea. Through the Korea Unification Leadership Academy, he brings them and South Korean students together to think about the kind of roles they might play in a unified Korea.

Nairobi, Kenya

Photographer: Kelly Johnson

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Rona (right) rehearses with one of the members of his dance crew before a crowd of fellow detainees.

Rona is team leader of Nairobi Remand and Allocation Prison’s Kanga Afrika dance crew. In his late 20s, he has been awaiting trial for more than four years. His crew dance like contenders on Sakata, a Kenyan television talent show. Watching them, it is hard to see them as prisoners, or the hall they practice in as a prison. Rona holds out his hand to show a wound. “I got this today while performing. You see? We believe in no pain, no gain. We have to keep working harder to achieve what we want to.” Kenya’s prison system is under-resourced and over-crowded. Detainees can wait up to eighteen years before being tried. Before his arrest, Rona was a member of a Nairobi-based dance group that had had some success, making music videos and TV appearances. In prison, he helps others find purpose and joy, despite the chaos and uncertainty of the environment in which they live.

Numazu, Japan

Photographer: Kazuhiro Yokozeki

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Yumi Muguruma, 45, is a social welfare worker at Smile Home, a day-care facility for the elderly in Numazu, a coastal city in central Japan. She’s also a former university professor of ethnology who believes oral histories can be a valuable tool in the care of older people, offering them a way to reconstruct memories, dignity and a sense of belonging. Through telling stories about themselves and their experiences, people make themselves active members of their community, says Yumi, who calls what she does “caring ethnology”. To encourage the residents of Smile Home to open up, Yumi shares folk narrative recordings she collected when she was a professional ethnologist. Then over meals of traditional Japanese food or at folklore dance evenings, people tell their own stories. Yumi believes that, as populations around the world age, approaches that recognise and respect the rich personal histories of older people will help bring generations together, creating more caring communities.

Busto Arsizio, Italy

Photographer: Stefano Borghi

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Italian Umberto Pelizzari is one of the world’s greatest freedivers. Born in 1965, through the 1990s and early 2000s he established world records across every freediving discipline. Since retiring from competing in 2001, he has dedicated his life to sharing his diving knowledge and calling for the world to take better care of its seas. Through Apnea Academy, his freediving training agency based in Busto Arsizio, a town near Milan in northern Italy, Umberto (below right) runs courses in swimming pools, at sea, in schools and research centres. Drawing on techniques from yoga and sophrology – a way of thinking that believes physical and mental exercises can be used to focus both the mind and the body – his lessons explore the mental side of diving more than its physical aspects.

Kawergosk Refugee Camp, Iraq

Photographer: Reza Visual Academy

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

At the Kawergosk refugee camp, near the city of Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan, Reza runs a photography workshop for Syrian children displaced by war in their home country. Seventeen of them, aged ten to fifteen, are taking part. Using cameras provided by Reza, an Iranian- French photographer of Azerbaijani origin, they are learning how to become reporters, taking pictures and sharing their experiences with people in other parts of the world. The point, says Reza, is not to teach the techniques of photography, but to show how a camera can reveal one’s vision to others. The project is one of many he has run over the last three-plus decades for young people and women living in or from conflict-ridden societies through his Reza Visual Academy.

Fars, Iran

Photographer: Valerie Leonard

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition)

Yaghoubi Liaghat teaches the children of nomads in southern Iran’s Fars province. His twelve students are all from a Turkic-speaking community. He teaches them Farsi, arithmetic, history, literature and science. In Iran, schools for nomads are known as “white tents”. The reason for this dates back to 1951 and the introduction of a new education system that included providing teachers and tents that would move with nomads as they migrated between their summer and winter camping grounds. Today, Yaghoubi still hosts his classes in a white tent. His teaching equipment is minimal. Most of what he uses he bought himself, paying for it out of his monthly salary of US$350. Ever since two of his students were run over and killed by a truck on their way home, Yaghoubi takes his pupils to and from their classes in his own car.

Valerie Leonard's photo-story won second place in our worldwide open call for submissions.

Serang, Indonesia

Photographer: Putu Sayoga

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition)

The sun has yet to rise, but Ridwan Sururi is already up and looking after his horses in his home village of Serang at the foot of Slamet volcano in central Java, Indonesia. Soon he will start his main task for the day: using one of his horses to carry a small mobile library to nearby schools. The idea for Ridwan’s “Kudapustaka” (horse library) first came up in a chat with a friend, Nirwan Arsuka, a fellow horse lover from Jakarta who helped launch the project with a gift of 136 children’s books. Since then, with more and more people hearing of the library through social media and local and international press coverage, book donations have grown into the thousands. Today, Ridwan is heading to Serang’s Elementary School No. 5. At nine o’clock, when the bell rings for the morning’s first break, children will run from their classrooms to return the books they have read and borrow new ones.

Medan, Indonesia

Photographer: Sutanta Aditya

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

In a tiny, open-air classroom beside a railway track in the city of Medan in Indonesia’s North Sumatra province, Dosri Bakkara teaches poor children. “My students haven’t been lucky with their lives, so I have to find ways to help them,” says Dosri. Born in the nearby town of Sidikalang in 1979, Dosri knew she wanted to be a teacher even before she graduated with a degree in social studies from North Sumatra University. She started her school in 2007 using US$225 she received in severance pay after working at a non-governmental organisation and funds from her parents. Helped by volunteers, her pupils study reading, maths, ethics, spiritual guidance and other subjects. The school has no government support; instead it is funded by donations from Dosri’s friends and former colleagues.