Here are the Youth Essay Competition winners!

The competition provided unique insights into the issues and challenges facing the winning cities from a youth perspective. These have the potential of contributing to more efficient municipal planning since they incorporate first hand account of life in the city. The essays celebrate youth commitment to the issues and challenges faced by the urban poor, the using deploying their entrepreneurial skills to impact these challenges, thereby making their own contribution to improving their lives. They also reinforce a number of the Cities Alliance key messages, for example the importance of community-based initiatives to better impact the lives of the urban poor, the need for better urban environmental planning, and of participation.

8 Finalists from Youth Essay Competition

First place winner Pal Saptarshi’s essay speaks to the urban environmental problems in his home city of Kolkata, India, specifically air pollution. “There is a direct link between air pollution and the probability of lung cancer. Calcutta, with an approximate population of 16 million, is ahead of all Indian cities when it comes to lung cancer at 18.4 cases per 100,000 people - much ahead of the widely publicized pollution in Delhi, which is at 13.34 cases per 100,000.”

His dream is of a Kolkata “with fresh air, water and soil, without the unhygienic slums, with no child labor and one with adequate number of public schools for poor kids”. To help realise this dream he has initiated a number of green initiatives. With a group of friends he established Nature Clubs Councils around a dozen schools, to raise funds and recruit volunteers to paint nature-based messages on walls to deter men from urinating against them, or to raise public awareness of the dangers of the plastic bags used to sell water on the streets of Kolkata, which were primarily responsible for clogging drains and causing flooding during monsoon season.

His group also harnessed the power of the media to educate people on nature-related issues. They launched the city's first nature-based newsletter- New Leaf - which became an instant hit. They also approached The Times of India, one of the nation’s premier newspapers to help publicise their need for funds to undertake three major projects, under the umbrella of Environment Consciousness Campaign (ECC) that they had planned for World Environment Day in June ‘04. The newspaper complied and got them corporate funding from Indian Oil, among other corporate sponsors, reinforcing the potential successes of private sector participation in urban environmental initiatives.

Success with the Nature Club Councils drew the attention of the city’s Mayor, whom helped scale up their activities with the formation of Mayor's Nature Club Council.

Second place winner Mengting Wang’s essay discusses how India’s NGO experience and their success at the grassroots level could be harnessed to impact the lives of the urban poor in Beijing, China. The essay cites a 2005 study by the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences which posits that there are at least 358 “urban corners” in Beijing. Urban corners are defined as areas of the city that where the less privileged live. They are less modernised and with fewer government funded interventions in terms of provision of basic services than other areas. Residents live in dilapidated houses; at Qianmen area, 93 percent of the houses are in danger of falling down or in bad need of repairs. Population density is higher in these areas with a demographic showing lower education and income levels. Social problems like pornography and crime abound.

The sad fact is that citizens of these urban corners make tremendous contribution to the development of the city, but they do not benefit from the economic boom in the city. “They build a Hilton (hotel) but they sleep in a falling shelter; they build our National Center of Performing Arts but they can’t even afford a movie.”

In order to shape Beijing into a city of balanced prosperity, Mengting proposes making a great effort to bridge the gap between the “marginal” and the “core”, between the rich and the poor. Eliminating “urban corners” is one approach to achieving this and there are three possible means to achieving this: recourse to market forces, the government force and to the grassroots. Focusing on the third recourse would ultimately benefit residents of these urban corners and this is where nongovernmental organisations could best be deployed. NGOs work among ordinary people of a community, and therefore possess a more accurate and authentic information on the local people than government.

Unfortunately NGO operations in China means are highly regulated. They are more like an “elite” conception instead of practical organizations for the ordinary people. She proposes a gradual mobilisation of resources and policy deregulation process to enable more impactive NGO services, similar to what she had experienced in Kolkata where she had worked with a grassroots NGO, Paschim Banga Krira-o-Janakalyan Parishad (PBKOJP) for 5 weeks.

IPBKOJP’s main activities were in a slum area called Khirdipur and a red light area called Kalighat. They had a variety of programs, penetrating into almost every aspect of the daily life of local people, including health and education. The Primary Health group of the NGO fro example, performed regular free checkups for the people. When the weekly checkups began, sex workers came for HIV/AIDS tests voluntarily. Through talking and visits, the NGOs became the bridge between the local people and schools, hospitals and governmental civil administrations.

Transporting that experience to China involved the establishment of a student NGO on the campuses of Beijing University where she is a student to bring new knowledge to the urban corners, using student resources. They formed themselves into three groups of “magicians”, the performing arts group, the primary health group and the education group. Magicians of the primary health group fro example can invite volunteers from the university Red Cross to give lectures on hygiene, or help with the daily care of the elderly.

Third place winner Maria Angelica Rodriguez’s essay discusses how technology, specifically the internet can be used by the urban poor to open the doors on a world of information that gives them the tools to explore and to establish contact with other individuals in similar situations for mutual learning and support. An initiative she runs – Opportunidadeassociales - operates five computer rooms in Bogotá public schools, serving more than 100 people every weekend, whose ages range from 15 to 60. This organisation is responsible for coordinating service delivery to the beneficiary population by linking schools, online course providers, community leaders and project beneficiaries.

All essays are downloadable from this link: http://www.essaycompetition.org/blog/?p=30

Follow up activities include packaging the winning essays into a publication to document their initiatives for broader audiences, promotion to local media to create greater public awareness and facilitating the finalists’ presentation of their proposals of their local councils.

Related information:

• 8 Finalists from Youth Essay Competition on Cities Selected!

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