Honiara, Solomon Islands

Photographer: Richard Wainwright

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

At her school in Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, Martina uses songs with simple lyrics to teach her young students how to cope with natural disasters. Using the tunes from well-known nursery rhymes, Martina, 28, and her students have written four songs so far – giving themselves instructions on what to do if they find themselves threatened by a flood, an earthquake, a tsunami or a landslide. The idea for the songs came from the Nursery Rhyme Program, run by Caritas Australia. “Nursery rhymes break down the fear associated with natural disasters, and also help children memorise the rhymes and the emergency response,” says Martina. The Solomon Islands lie in a region vulnerable to earthquakes, tsunamis and extreme weather. “We have a cyclone season that runs from November to March annually,” says Martina. “This season we’re better prepared and know how to respond. In an emergency these songs can make all the difference.”

Yishun, Singapore

Photographer: Bernice Wong

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Dheena, one of Mel’s sons, and Melvinder, another Pluspoint member, take part in a pairs dance competition in a Singapore night club.

Mel celebrating her 34th birthday.

Mel, 35, runs Pluspoint, a dance group for at-risk young men in Singapore. The group’s eight to ten members meet around three times a week to practise their repertoire of hip-hop, folk and modern Indian dance. Mel has been imprisoned twice for drug-related offences. She set up Pluspoint after being released from her second spell in jail in 2010. Its mission is to help young people avoid drugs and drug-related crime. A single mother, Mel supports herself and her seven children by working as a cleaner at Orchard Gateway, a shopping mall in downtown Singapore. The group’s running costs are low. When new costumes are needed, everyone chips in a little money.

Kabala, Sierra Leone

Photographer: Jenny Matthews

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Samuel Koroma lives and works in Kabala, a small rural town in the north of Sierra Leone. He’s a regular class teacher at the local Roman Catholic school. He’s also blind. Samuel has been blind from birth. Because of his disability, his parents were reluctant to spend money on his education. Instead, his school costs and teacher training were funded by organisations such as Leonard Cheshire Disability. “My future goal is to be a community development worker or a social worker. I also want to take a more active role in civil service in areas other than teaching, maybe working with my fellow disabled people,” he says. “I feel lucky to be doing this, I feel as though I am doing something. I feel like somebody who belongs, doing something with the rest of the world,” he says.

Guediawaye, Senegal

Photographer: Christian Bobst

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Lac stands before Dakar’s Mar Diop stadium, the site of his 2003 knockout victory over the Commando.

At Lac’s school, wrestlers spend months training for fights, usually training for hours each day.

Traditional forms of wrestling are found throughout West Africa. But nowhere is the sport more popular than in Senegal, where its version – known as laamb – even beats out football, and top fighters can earn as much as several hundred thousand dollars a year for a single bout. Across the country, Lac de Guiers is famous for his 2003 victory over the Commando, a much taller adversary who at the time was one of the country’s best-known wrestlers. Today, Lac runs his own wrestling school in Guédiawaye, a town near Dakar, the country’s capital, passing on his knowledge to young men eager to become professional wrestlers.

Kabaya, Rwanda

Photographer: Tadej Žnidarčič

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Since 2005, e-Rwanda – a project jointly organised by the World Bank and the Rwandan government – has been teaching people about the internet across Rwanda. A specially equipped bus travels round the country providing free internet and computer training in places where it is not possible to get online. The e-Rwanda project stems from the early 2000s when the Rwandan government identified information and communications technology – ICT – as a major source of development. Since then, the country has built a 2,500-kilometre fibre-optic network radiating to all parts of the country from Kigali, Rwanda’s capital.

Moscow, Russia

Photographer: Nataliya Kharlamova

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

For nearly two decades, Viktor Krotov, 70, has run a free creative-writing studio for children and adults with and without disabilities. In his classes, he helps people discover and explore their own creativity. His students play games using poetry, fiction, essays and aphorisms and see what emerges – a process Viktor calls “shaking by genres”. For most of his students, Viktor’s creative games are a therapy in their own right – ways of helping them understand and cope with everyday life. For a few, the games have led to a new vocation. Sonya Shatalova (right) has severe autism that prevents her from speaking or writing by herself. Through Viktor’s classes, she discovered a talent for writing poetry. A collection of her work, I Am Not Mute, was published in Moscow in 2015.

Vila De Conde, Portugal

Photographer: Rui Farinha

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

For more than four centuries, Vila do Conde has been one of Europe’s leading makers of bobbin lace, a textile created by twisting lengths of linen thread into intricate patterns. Today, the ways of making bobbin lace are being introduced to children through regular classes at the Bobbin Lace School in the town’s Bobbin Lace Museum. In the 20th century, machine-made lace led to a decline in Vila do Conde’s hand-made lace-making. From more than 500 lacemakers in the 1940s, the number fell to 100 elderly lace-makers by the late 1970s. More recently, the opening of a cra centre, the holding of an annual cra fair and a growth in tourism have all helped spur

Dulag, Philippines

Photographer: Dana Romanoff

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

In 2013, after a super typhoon wreaked destruction across much of the Philippines, Robin Lim returned to her home country to head up a disaster relief team. In the typhoon’s aftermath she and a team of midwives delivered 489 babies in a five-squaremetre tent. Before her return to the Philippines, Robin worked in Indonesia, Haiti and Nepal, working with international non-governmental organisations providing care for pregnant and birthing women in the aftermath of natural disasters. Robin decided to work in reducing maternal and infant mortality after her sister died of a preventable condition in pregnancy. As well as her disaster relief work, she also teaches at skills seminars for midwives.

Lima, Peru

Photographer: Elie Gardner & Oscar Durand

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Raissa Vargas, 28, and her husband own a modest wood home on a hillside in Carabayllo, a slum area in Lima, the capital of Peru, where they gave birth to their first child in 2011. Raising a child in neighbourhoods like Carabayllo is a challenge. Access to quality education and healthcare is a constant fight. Across Peru, one in five children under the age of five suffers from chronic malnutrition. The rate is even higher in Carabayllo. To give mothers more tools to manage these challenges, a non-profit organisation, Partners in Health, started training women such as Raissa to be leaders in their communities, teaching them about the importance of early childhood stimulation and nutrition, and then encouraging them to share what they had learned with their neighbours. Raissa is not paid for this grassroots work. Rather, she sees the time she spends as an investment in the future, for both her daughter and the community. “I see so many young people in the area dropping out of school and drinking too much,” she says. “I don’t want our children to copy that.” When mothers complain or don’t want to come to a session, Raissa laughs and tells them, “Stop whining! You will see later, your child will thank you.”

West New Britain, Papua New Guinea

Photographer: Jürgen Freund

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition)

On the north coast of Papua New Guinea’s West New Britain province, Lorna Romaso (right) takes a group of students from a local high school snorkelling along a reef. Although the students come from nearby coastal villages, most know little about the underwater world of the sea on their doorsteps. On snorkelling and boat trips to reefs, the students find out about both the abundance of life in this environment and its fragility. Lorna’s course is run by Mahonia Na Dari, a non-governmental organisation whose name means “guardian of the sea” in the local Bakovi language. Mahonia Na Dari has been running programmes like this since 1997. Classes of up to twenty students spend their mornings in a classroom, then move to snorkelling in the sea in the afternoons. The students learn about reef biology, environmental issues, how to protect marine ecosystems and the importance of marine resource management.

Kiad, Panama

Photographer: Ramón Lepage

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

In Kiad, a community in western Panama’s Ngäbe-Buglé land reserve, Manolo Miranda and his family run a cultural centre dedicated to teaching and preserving the cultural identity of the Ngäbe people. The centre’s classes teach people to read and write in Ngäbe using a script created by Manolo. The Miranda family is also petitioning Panama’s education authorities to allow schools in their region to teach in Ngäbe, a language spoken by around 130,000 people, as well as Spanish. As well as running his family’s cultural centre, Manolo is also one of the leaders of a group opposing the construction of a hydro-power dam that when completed will flood the reserve’s main river, the Tabasara.

Bir Zayt, Palestine

Photographer: Hamde Abu Rahma

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Raid Hananiya, a Christian born in Jerusalem, is the only person making candles by hand in Bir Zayt, a town in Palestine’s West Bank area. Now in his mid-forties, he learned to make candles in his mid-teens, taught by his cousins who ran a candle-making company. In the early 1990s, he started his own candle-making business. Since then, imports of mass-produced candles have led to most other candle-makers in Bir Zayt shutting up shop. Raid only makes candles on Fridays and Sundays. He spends the rest of the week working as a builder to earn enough money to support himself and his family. To keep candle-making alive in Palestine, he is sharing his knowledge with his fifteen-yearold son, Isa. “I’m very focused on teaching him everything about making candles so that he can teach his children one day,” says Raid. “I hope people will start focusing more on these handmade products again. For me it is not just a business. Candles bring light to the darkness, which is exactly what we need in this difficult life.” Raid and Isa sell most of the candles they make to churches in nearby Bethlehem and Ramallah.

Islamabad, Pakistan

Photographer: Khaula Jamil

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Civil servant Mohammad Ayub Khan spends his after-work hours and weekends teaching students in an open-air school in north-east Islamabad. Known to his pupils as Master Ayub, he has no formal training as a teacher. But he does have a quarter century of experience. Twenty-five years ago he arrived in Islamabad in search of work. Seeing many children on the streets collecting trash and rags instead of attending school, he decided to offer them free lessons. Today, he has 250 students enrolled in the makeshift school he runs in a public park. On weekdays, he works as a chief fire officer. He splits his salary three ways – one part to his wife, who also runs a small school, one part for his own basic needs, and the rest for his school. Whenever he can, he helps his pupils with their medical expenses and other necessities. “My hope is that one child will join the army, one will become a doctor, one will become a policeman, and so on. This is how I can make this country a better place,” says Master Ayub.

Pyongsong, North Korea

Photographer: Mark Edward Harris

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

''You’re looking in top form!” “Something got you down?” “I got my report card and I’m not happy about it.” “Long time no see!” “Many happy returns of the day.” “My gracious!” At Kim Jong Suk Higher Middle School in the North Korean city of Pyongsong, students are taking an afternoon English class. It seems unlikely any of them will ever put their learning to use in an English-speaking country. But if that bothers them, they don’t show it. Occasionally, visitors from Western countries are brought to watch the class. In a brief question-and-answer session that follows, every student wants to ask a question. “Why is America so dangerous?” one of them asks a visitor from England. His teacher gently reprimands him: “It is not polite to ask such a question of our guest.” The students laugh. The English visitor laughs. The teacher laughs.

Abuja, Nigeria

Photographer: Aleksei Akseshin

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Everyone in Mpape, a slum area in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, knows football coach Sword Umoroigwe, a former player with the Nigerian national team, and his Super Star Soccer Academy. Founded in 2000, the academy now has nearly 60 footballers on its books, aged from four to their early 20s, five of them girls. When they join the academy, everyone pays a oneoff enrolment fee of 25,000 naira (about US$85 at Nigeria’s unofficial exchange rate) for clothes and basic equipment. But after that they train and play for free. The academy’s training ground is next to a rubbish dump. When the wind swings round to the northeast, rubbish and acrid smoke blow across the pitch. Coaching takes place every day apart from Sunday, starting at seven o’clock. Sessions begin with a collective prayer shared by everyone, both Christian and Muslim. Sword has taken teams from his academy to competitions in other countries in Africa and once to Europe, to play in Denmark’s Dana Cup, a competition held every year for youth teams from around the world.

Agadez, Niger

Photographer: Matilde Gattoni

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Ajo, 92, plays her imzad at a gathering of Tuareg women and girls. The bowlshaped body of Ajo’s instrument is made from a calabash with an animal skin drawn taut across its top to create a sound box. Its single string, and that of its bow, are made from horse hair. In the Tuareg’s matrilineal culture, only women play the imzad, which can be played as a solo instrument and to accompany singing. Performances usually take place at evening parties. The nomadic Tuareg have for centuries lived across the Saharan areas of what are now Mali, Niger, Algeria and Libya. Women have traditionally been the main conduit passing culture from one generation to the next. Since the start of the 20th century, the number of imzad players has been in gradual but continual decline. Ajo is one of only three women who plays the imzad in her community.

Masaya, Nicaragua

Photographer: Antonio Aragón Renuncio

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

Marco Cano, a former national amateur champion, runs a boxing school in his house in the indigenous community of Pacayita in Masaya, a city in central Nicaragua. Every evening, Marco and his father, Jose, train children and young people. Some of their students have fought in regional and national tournaments. The school has few facilities, but for young people from the surrounding area it offers an alternative to gangs and drugs.

Soesterberg, Netherlands

Photographer: Annette Nijenbanning

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

After deciding that today’s schools could not prepare their five children to live in today’s world, Gerdt and Janneke Kernkamp set up their own school in their home in Soesterberg, a town in the northern Netherlands. Already they have sixteen children learning at the school. Classes alternate between interdisciplinary projects, personal leadership lessons, traditional subjects and expeditions – trips to museums or a local race track for the younger children, journeys to other countries to learn languages and life skills for the older ones. “At our school a student takes an individual learning path,” say Gerdt and Janneke. “Learning is divided between making your own choices and working together in a peer group setting. Who am I? What do I see in the world? What talents do I have to share with the world? All children need a broad range of knowledge and experiences to figure out these questions.”

Kathmandu, Nepal

Photographer: Mark Edward Harris

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

The hundred students at Kathmandu’s Oscar International College of Film Studies have a dream – to make a name for “Nepaliwood”, and take their country’s film industry out of the shadow of their giant neighbour India’s Bollywood. Even the earthquake that shook Nepal on 25 April 2015, killing more than 9,000 people, hasn’t changed that. The school was closed that week, and none of its students or staff were injured. But its main four-storey building was destroyed, and classes are now held in temporary structures put up on its campus. Later that year, student Min Bahadur Bham screened his feature film “The Black Hen” at the Venice International Film Festival. And others are starting to pick up awards at international film festivals around the world. “Our students are creating a new wave in the Nepalese film industry,” says Binod Paudel, the college’s principal and acting coach.

Yangon, Myanmar

Photographer: Carsten Snejbjerg

Year of Submission: 2016 (Educators Edition) 

In Myanmar, Buddhist schools offer girls from poor families the opportunity to receive an education. At the end of their final year, students can choose whether to remain at the school and teach, go on to further education or return to their homes. Although attendance at the schools is free, all students are expected to go out on to the streets of Yangon collecting food and donations twice a week.