Youth competition winners announced – Flood and Drought risk management

The winners of the Global Competition for Youth led projects on Floods and Droughts were announced at the Youth Forum for the Global Platform on Disaster Risk Reduction on the 22nd of May in Cancun, Mexico.

The competition was designed to showcase the practical examples and cases on how an integrated approach to flood and drought risk management has been advanced in practice by or through the involvement of youth under the following three themes 1) Understanding risk, 2) Early warning system development, and 3) risk management and planning.

We are very pleased to announce the following winner in each category.

Category 1 winner: ongoing projects 

Integrated Participatory and Collaborative Digital Mapping to Enhance Disaster Resilience in Nepal.

Prakash Khadka, Center for Social Development and Research (CSDR).

This project engages young social mobilizers and volunteers by training them to integrate community-based participatory mapping processes with internet-based collaborative digital mapping technologies. The main objective is to map key information pertaining to flood hazard, exposure and vulnerability at the household and community level across lower Karnali river basin before the 2017 monsoon, and to develop a transdisciplinary approach that can be replicated in similar regions across Nepal. So far, 54 communities in Kailali and Bardiya districts have been remotely mapped (including more than 2500 houses and over 100km of roads/trails) by volunteers from around Nepal.

Category 2 winner: New project proposals

“Preparing our Home” program

Lily Yumagulova, Casey Gabrial, Sandy Bernice and students from the “Preparing our Home” program. Xet̓ólacw Community School and International Sustainability Education Foundation (ISEF).

“Preparing our Home” is a community-based disaster resilience program developed and implemented by Canada’s First Nations communities. Beginning with developing multiple grade school curriculum, it creates intergenerational, multi-stakeholder opportunities to understand risk and develop context-specific youth-led and community implemented risk management and planning activities. Training activities in their project implementation pipeline, focus on understanding risk, developing flood and drought resilience strategies, and developing emergency management plans and preparedness planning. See their video here.

Contributions to the Global Platform on DRR

Both projects were presented at the UN Major Group for Children and Youth (UN MGCY) Youth Forum poster session and  Market Place at GPDRR this week. Their posters are available online here.

Furthermore, Practical Action has submitted a policy brief to the UNMGCY Science Policy Interface publication – available here (page 13).

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Follow-up activities

The Water Youth Network in collaboration with the World Meteorological Organization/Global Water Partnership (GWP) flood and drought management programmes: Associated Programme on Flood Management (APFM) and Integrated Drought Management Programme (IDMP) look forward to working with the winners to maximise the use of the prize money for social impact in their communities.

Congratulations to the winners and we will keep you posted on updates!

YouKnow Platform!

The competition aimed to collate youth initiatives and disseminate them via the Water Youth Network YouKnow Platform. Over 20 projects have been included in the platforms interactive map which is available here.

If you would like to submit your water related initiative, you can do so here.

Youknow                 YouKNOW