Youth Grant Competition winners receive recognition in Dhaka awards ceremony

The winners of this year’s Youth Grant Competition organized in Bangladesh were announced on March 20th in an award ceremony held in Dhaka.  The competition was arranged by Relief International – Schools Online (RI-SOL) through the ECA-funded Global Connections and Exchange (GCE) program.  The event brought together ten youth aged eight to sixteen from the Comilla, Chittagong, Jessore and Dhaka districts, who were awarded mini-grants to implement service projects in their communities.  Selected from a pool of 37 applicants, the finalists submitted detailed proposals for projects on issues such as education, social awareness, online dialogue, youth volunteerism, and adolescent health. Proposals were judged based on project effectiveness, innovativeness, appropriateness, motivation, potential for replication, and usefulness. Proposals focused on critical issues students identified in their communities, which also concern youth around the world. For example, one participant will create a Bengali-language website and use multimedia presentations in workshops organized for local farmers to raise awareness in her community about avian influenza and how to prevent and combat it.  One winner of the mini-grant competition proposed to open a Bengali-language educational and social networking portal where Bangladeshi youth would meet, socialize, share resources, and collaborate on projects. Other winning projects focused on environmental conservation, birth registration, an online database of youth volunteers ready to be ‘activated’ for community service and in the case of natural disasters, HIV/AIDS prevention and the rights of persons living with the illness, and a virtual library. The award ceremony, where winners had a chance to showcase their action plans, was followed by a training session on website creation using free blog technology. This year’s winners’ profiles and projects can be accessed at http://www.connect-bangladesh.org/content/view/477/101/.