The joy of giving

Charity should begin at home, but should not stay there, says 17-year-old Li Yuqi, who's always on the qui vive for an opportunity to help the less privileged in strife-torn African nations.

An 11th grader at the Affiliated High School of Shanxi University in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, Li often yearned for a chance to volunteer in programs meant to benefit refugees and impoverished communities in Ethiopia, ever since she heard heartrending stories about their loss and despair from the family of a childhood friend who moved there.

Three years ago, she participated in an online research on empowerment of African women, which stiffened her resolve to help. The right opportunity came knocking this summer in the form of a competition that encourages high school students to propose and execute public welfare projects to improve medical, nutritional and educational conditions of vulnerable groups in Africa.

Li's idea to provide solar equipment to the poverty-stricken Ethiopian village of Mojoo－where rural clinics are forced to put medical emergencies on hold in the absence of an uninterrupted electricity supply－made it to the finals of the Public Benefit International Challenge for Youth on Aug 14. She is now inching closer to her dream of becoming a field volunteer.

"We rise by lifting others. Every time I heard about life in refugee camps, where hygiene is questionable, food is always in short supply and drinking water is probably contaminated, I groaned in anguish. I was determined to help," says the feisty teenager.

The finals required participants to give elaborate online presentations on how their proposed projects could benefit target groups. Finalists also had to answer pointed queries on the feasibility of their projects from a panel of judges, including UNFPA China assistant representative Peng Jiong, partnerships specialist with UNICEF China Zhang Yan and senior adviser to China International Publishing Group David Ferguson.

Before they made it to the finals, Li and her team－comprising Xue Muhan, a Chinese high school student based in Ethiopia, and Xue's schoolmates Kal Melaku and Tesnim Ahmed－contacted the Ethiopia Office of China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation, seeking advice and permission for field research in villages.

During their ground investigation, Xue, Melaku and Ahmed discovered that a majority of clinics in rural areas grapple with a power crisis, which frequently leads to suspension of emergency procedures at night. The team decided to find a viable solution to this electricity problem.

Between May and August, Li and her friends promoted the cause on social media in an effort to raise funds to purchase solar equipment. The team plans to buy 60 tailor-made pieces of equipment－basically a wireless, fixed phone with solar-powered LED lights－from an energy company for rural clinics. It has also convinced the company to donate 200 solar reading lights to students in the village.

Organizers of the competition may offer Li a chance to work as a field volunteer in Ethiopia for implementation of the project. As team leader, she is in charge of drafting the final plan, contacting enterprises and managing fundraising data.

"The competition has not only honed my leadership skills, it has also allowed a good grasp of ways to mobilize enterprises for charity endeavors in the future," Li says, adding that she wants to major in health science, which would equip her better for public welfare projects around the globe.

Barely into her teenage years, the Western Academy of Beijing student Xu Yijia bagged the top prize at this year's competition for her project to raise funds for mosquito control at a public primary school in Uganda, where malaria is a serial killer.

To promote the project online, the 13-year-old wrote a rap song on how the vector-borne parasitic infection was threatening lives in the landlocked East African nation and exhorting netizens to join the crusade against malaria.

"Most contestants filmed a short documentary to promote their projects, but we decided to add a beat or two," Yijia says. The strategy worked and the music video garnered more than 3.2 million views online, winning the team the judges' favor.

Yijia sees her three-month experience related to the competition as "a lesson in teamwork" and "a rehab course" against stage fright. Earlier, she was a bit shy and the thought of a public presentation would make her nervous.

"I will share my enlightening experience with my schoolmates. Together, we plan to launch and run a charity club on campus to realize sustainable development goals," she says.

Since 2017, the competition has attracted more than 1,800 high school students from home and abroad, who put forward innovative ideas to promote the welfare of African people, especially women and children.

The competition was co-initiated five years ago by the China-Africa Business Council and the United Nations Population Fund to achieve sustainable development goals. By the end of last year, welfare projects incubated by the competition had reached more than 51,287 people in 16 African countries, including Sudan, Mozambique and Rwanda.