Young Innovators to travel to Stockholm

The Stockholm Junior Water Prize is an annual competition where young environment enthusiasts from around the world present projects trying to solve water-related environmental problems that ravage this planet. The competition is overseen by the Stockholm International Water Institute who presents the award at a ceremony held in Stockholm during the World Water Week. This year, a team from St. Joseph Higher Secondary School won the national round to earn the ticket to Sweden. 

The team of Sheikh Rifayet Daiyan Srijon, Navid Haider and Labib Tazwar Rahman, all of whom have passed their SSC this year, is going to have the honour of representing Bangladesh and their institution at a global platform. They qualified through an initial stage where they presented a 20-page paper which explained the idea that they thought could be the solution to the ever growing water crisis in our cities, and they were selected to the regional finals held at BUET where they presented their project in front of a panel of professors, representatives from WaterAid and the Embassy of Sweden. The panel eventually adjudged them to be the best of the lot from Bangladesh and their project “AquaProcessor” won the Bangladesh Stockholm Junior Water Prize. 

“AquaProcessor” is an integration of rainwater harvesting and grey water recycling process which can be used by new building owners to improve water efficiency that will also help users to reduce their water bills in the long run. It also saves rivers from being polluted to a great extent,” says Labib Tazwar Rahman. According to him, this could tackle head on the issues we have in Dhaka with large treatment plants never seeing the light of day beyond proposition files. “We believe the targeted problems of groundwater depletion and lack of an environment-friendly water management system can be sufficiently tackled by AquaProcessor,” he adds. 

This team of young innovators are scheduled to leave for Stockholm in August where they will fight contenders from all over the world to be called winners of the Stockholm Junior Water Prize. If they do manage to achieve that feat, what awaits them is a USD 15,000 scholarship and a blue crystal prize sculpture on top of the collective admiration from around the world for the talent produced from Bangladesh. 
Sheikh Rifayet Daiyan Srijon, one of the young men behind the idea, says, “Preparing for the international round has been daunting but all the effort will end in vain if local corporations don't sponsor our initiative financially. We hope patrons will come forward and help us financially to represent Bangladesh at a global stage.” That is what we hope as well because young minds like them can help us move forward in the future, and it is at this stage that they need the most backing.  

When he's not obsessing over football, Azmin Azran spends his time devising ways of not getting mugged, only to fail miserably. Give him advice at fb.com/azminazran.