"Sewer Toursim" WSYA 2009, Category 5: Go Green! Team Members: Andrew Mutua, Samuel Odour, Kevin Omondi and the local community On behalf of Tufahamike, I would like to share my deepest gratitude to World Summit Youth Award 2009 for all your support  and for having recognised our shared ambitions and efforts towards environmental conservation through the Sewer Tourism project. After a successful initiation and rollout of the project (Sewer Tourism), with the support of our local community and three of my college mates, we decided to start Tufahamike (a Swahili word for "Let's be Enlightened"), a youth based Initiative whose main objective is to educate and involve the youth towards achieving the MDGs. After the recognition you gave the sewer tourism project, we managed to draw a lot of interest from the community thus getting more members and growth in the impact of our activities. Our vision is to open a detailed resource centre with the aim of using ICT as a bridge for the youth to access information and get enlightened. We believe knowledge is power and providing the uninformed an access to information will enable us make better choices and improve lives. We are currently running the Sewer Tourism project where we have been able to educate the community on health and environmental issues and getting more volunteers to work on our seedbeds, maintaining the trees and toilets and also garbage collection, the challenge is lack of funds to run the program to its full potential. With more trees been planted we still working towards reducing the rate of pollution into the Nairobi river. Our greatest achievement was having the community appreciate and recognise the project as one of their own. Lack or little knowledge of the MDGs mainly here in Kenya has hindered the realization of the goals, but by educating the community (youth in particular), it will create a platform for exchange of ideas and establishment of community based solutions. Once again I would like to thank WSA recognition and promotion of our project and for their role as a global contest for best practice to support a better world. www.nairobits.com/students/
Alternatives: "Finding new Possibilities for Youth",  WSYA 2009, Category 2: Education for all!  Team Members: Sanjeev Raj Neupane, Jiban, Samundra, Ashis, Tulashi, Rit and Santosh Sanjeev Raj Neupane wrote to the WSYA Team: "I was very happy when I first saw the news of winning the world summit youth award 2009 in my mail inbox. After returning from Monterrey by receiving the award there were lots of best wishes and congratulations to me and our team. The award took us to new heighsts and all the team members were feeling more responsible after the award. One of the main benefit by winning the WSYA has been the international recognition. Similarly the participation in WSYA ceremony in Monterrey provided a platform for international networking. Today we are in contact with many friends from around the world. We regularly meet online and discuss about the progress of our project. We also share with one another about the problems that occurred and success achieved. The award also helped us in making our project more accepted and popular. After the award ceremony there has been more clicks on our website and there were requests from different organisations to conduct entrepreneurship trainings to them. After receiving the WSYA, we have been awarded two new projects. We have recently received small grants from Global Youth Coalition on HIV/AIDS to conduct trainings on entrepreneurship in schools and colleges to reduce the HIV. Though we have achieved some success till now, there are many accomplishments yet to be achieved. The main vision of alternatives is to establish one home one enterprise in all the VDCs of Kaski district. But till now we are done with only one VDC. So in the near future we plan to expand IT education in all the VDCs of Kaski district and we plan to establish Rural Youth Enterpreneurship Development Center in all VDCs of Kaski district. I would like to express sincere thanks WSA for providing me an wonderful opportunity to participate in World Summit Youth Award." Sanjeev Raj Neupane, Alternatives, Nepal
"Empower Women and Meet Millennium Development Goals" WSYA 2009, Category 3: Power 2 Women! Team Members: George Onyango, Christine Akinyi and David Mita George Onyango wrote: "The mane recognition that my organization received by winning WSYA meant that our work can be relied on to benefit others. So far, we have had the benefit of partnering with Vlad's and Adam's institution. They have had time to visit the work SIDAREC has been doing and believe that we can strike some kind of partnership to benefit youth and women in the slums.  Winning WSYA has helped SIDAREC in terms of the general population's perception of what SIDAREC has been doing to promote women livelihood in the slums. They do recon that women are the pillars of development in the African society and if given support, the country would be able to achieve most of the MDGs before 2015. The result has seen many institutions opting for programs that support/promote women in development. The award has been very helpful in connecting me with other networks, particularly among the WSYA winners. We have also been lucky to have networks from other countries who would want to learn from our work. An example is the Data Digital Divide who have shown the interest in working with SIDAREC. Our future plans are to put up a revolving fund in the slums for women and youth so that we are able to meet part or all of the MDGs. Revolving Fund is the only way in empowering youth and women take initiatives of development in to their own hands." For further information: www.sidarec.org
Lil’ MDGs – "Youth Making Global Changes" WSYA 2009: Category 1: Fight Poverty, Hunger and Disease! Team Members: Tiffany Ang, Pooja Dharan, Nina Mahalingam, Dylan Mahalingam, and over 20,000 more children from 40 countries! In 2009, Lil’ MDGs was recognized by the United Nations as the best practice in e-content and technological creativity, demonstrating young people’s potential to create outstanding digital content and serving as a platform for people from all UN member states to work together on meeting the MDGs. The recognition provided Lil' MDGs with more visibility in addition to opening up a myriad of possibilities. This international recognition provided us with an amazing platform and an avenue to network with youth from several new countries. Our organization now has more than 20,000 youth volunteers from 40 countries and we have made a tangible difference in the lives of over 1 million individuals worldwide. Since the 2010 World Summit Award Gala and the UN Global Forum on ICT and Development, I have been invited to be a youth speaker for both the United Nations Environment Programme and United Nations Development Programme, and I travel internationally to speak to various groups. Most recently, Disney selected Lil’ MDGs to be one of its ongoing volunteering opportunities for 2010. Lil' MDGs was also invited by the UN last year to work on the UN Worldwide Campaign on Climate Change, Seal the Deal. We connected with groups of children in various countries around the world to hold peaceful assemblies for Seal the Deal. We also had six delegates from five different countries representing Lil’ MDGs at COP15 in Copenhagen to get youth voices heard by the decision makers. I intend to continue to leverage the power of the Internet, digital, and social media to expand the network with the goal of engaging more youth to help meet the MDGs. Visit Lil' MDGs
"Facebook Application Intercultural" WSYA 2009: Category 4: Create your Culture! Team: Stephan Hamberger and Mathias Haas from Austria and Users from more than 25 countries in the world.  In 2009, Facebook Application Intercultural was recognized as one of the best practice in e-content and technological creativity in the category “create your culture”. In our opinion information, knowledge and education are some of the basic means of fighting poverty and discrimination. Using “Intercultural“, especially young people are encouraged to be aware of the way of living in many different and very often less affluent countries. Very young users can make their first acquaintance with other cultures by simply watching slideshows and making their first international contacts. Others might practice languages by communicating with suitable Intercultural users or find accommodation when travelling by using the integrated hospitality service which enables the user to go beyond the borders of virtuality. With our Facebook application we want to enable young people all over the globe to get to know each other and we aim at expanding our platform to reach even more people. Through the World Summit Award we were able to participate in the WSA and UNDESA GAID events in Monterrey, Mexico, from September 2nd to September 5th, 2009. The WSA and UNDESA GAID events in Mexico were a unique opportunity to meet and connect with WSA winners and other young creatives to exchange ideas, which was great. We did not just meet new people, we got new friends. Next to that we met ICT experts, multimedia producers as well as government and business leaders, and were able to participate in several brilliant workshops. Our new friends helped us to promote our application in their community. As a result we got a lot of new users and their number is still increasing. Further on we got the idea to create a platform for all the WSYA Winners and Runners Up to stay connected, to share ideas and experiences longer. So we worked together with the ICNM to realise this idea and we managed. Our vision is to make “Intercultural” the application number one on Facebook, encouraging international relationships, mutual understanding, tolerance and solidarity and we want to thank the WSYA for the opportunity to take further steps. Watch out for the platform YA-Friends...coming soon!