5, Including Indian Teen, Win UN-Backed Prize For Using Tech To Drive Change

An Indian teenager behind mobile tools to monitor water quality won a United Nations-backed youth activist prize on Thursday, alongside other young people lauded for using technology to drive positive change.

Dev Karan, 17, was announced as one of five winners of the annual Young Activists Summit (YAS) prize for his work to help restore India's traditional ponds, which are multi-functional water harvesting structures that store water and help prevent floods and soil erosion.

Karan co-founded Pondora, an organisation that helps villages monitor their water quality using IT-based sensors and mobile tools, which he developed to track contamination.

The prize committee said it was "a replicable model for water ecosystem restoration -- one pond at a time."

"Change doesn't occur when we're sitting in ivory towers," Karan said in a statement released by the YAS.

"We have to go down the swamp and we have to bring change ourselves."

Other winners of this year's prize, which will be awarded at a ceremony in Geneva in November, include 20-year-old Rena Kawasaki of Japan, who at the age of 14 co-founded a group connecting students and politicians through Zoom sessions to boost youth participation in politics.

Brazilian activist Salvino Oliveira, 27, is also on the list with his organisation PerifaConnection, which works to amplify the voices of favela youth and help first-generation students access university.

Another laureate, 24-year-old Marina El Khawand of Lebanon, meanwhile, founded her organisation Medonations after the giant 2020 Beirut port explosion, which killed more than 220 people.

"What began with a single social media post to help an elderly woman access life-saving medicine has grown into a global community with collection points in more than 65 countries, delivering free medication and consultations to over 25,000 people," the prize committee said.

"When people were dying because they couldn't afford oxygen or medicine, we couldn't just watch -- we had to act," she said in the statement.

Aminata Savane, a 25-year-old from Ivory Coast, will also share this year's prize for her work to make the digital world more inclusive and safer in underserved communities, the prize committee said.

Savane, who began blogging in 2020 against online disinformation about Covid-19, has, through her organisation Centre Maree de Lumiere (Tide of Light Centre), helped provide digital skills and leadership training to hundreds of women and adolescents in vulnerable communities. 

"Digital technology is an opportunity we cannot miss," she said, warning that "those who do not adapt risk becoming the illiterate of the 21st century".

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)