How young people around the world are using technology to address the climate crisis — Assembly

Students from Egypt, Kazakhstan, Nigeria and Turkey share the climate apps they created with the help of Technovation.

When girls receive a quality education, they are able to come up with creative answers to some of the world’s most pressing problems. Research shows that when girls receive a comprehensive science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education, they are more likely to develop innovative solutions to the climate crisis.

Just ask 15-year-old Egyptian student Nadine Abdelaziz, co-founder of Treasury Water, an award-winning app that decreases water use in homes by monitoring and calculating water consumption and educating users how to use water wisely. Or 18-year-old Benedictha Pam from Nigeria who helped create ClimaAx, a mobile game that helps engage users in carbon-reducing activities.

Nadine and Benedictha are two of the hundreds of young women around the world who have created apps to address the climate crisis with the support of the nonprofit Technovation. Through programmes like Technovation Girls, the organisation teaches young women around the world how they can solve problems in their communities using technology.

The students involved in Technovation Girls are increasingly identifying climate change as one of the most pressing problems facing their communities. In 2020, 20% of all programme submissions addressed environmental issues. Through partnerships with organisations and companies like the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), ServiceNow, The McGovern Foundation and Shopify, Technovation has developed an innovative curriculum that allows programme participants to leverage the latest space and AI technologies for climate action.

We spoke to students from Egypt, Kazakhstan, Nigeria and Turkey to learn about the apps they created with Technovation to tackle the climate crisis, the skills that helped them develop these solutions and how they think schools can better help students tackle climate change.

Tap Tap Trees, Turkey

A mobile game developed by 17-year-olds Debi Ahitov, Irmak Kaşıkcı and Dafne Sarfati to raise awareness about reforestation and improved air quality efforts. As part of the game, users pass levels by planting trees.

Tell us about creating Tap Tap Trees. Why did you and your team decide to create an app focused on educating people on how they can take climate action?

At the time the new Istanbul Airport was being built, we all lived very close to the site, and we saw firsthand the cutting of trees to build the airport. There was constant commotion around our living area due to the construction machines passing by, and the roads were clustered with dust. It was pretty devastating to see how much pollution was happening around, and we were all very disturbed at the amount of deforestation that was happening around us. As we were prompted to think about the most major issue in our community, we wanted to address this problem and eventually connect it to air pollution and thus climate change. While developing the application, we all realized that there was much to do about this problem, but too little awareness, so we decided to spread awareness while also making a change.

Why do you think some people in Turkey don’t realise they have the ability to help save the environment?

In recent years, people's freedom of speech and press has begun to be restricted in Turkey, and this situation — especially for young people — has caused people to remain silent on issues that affect themselves and their future, such as climate change. Moreover, the lack of sufficient resources to make a change in the country is another aspect that discourages people to take climate action.

Is climate change and how you can help fight it a topic that Turkey schools teach?

Environmental issues are taught every year at the end of science classes’ units, but they focus on broader topics instead of the specifics of climate change. However, they aren’t taken very seriously since they put the units at the end of the school year and they aren’t included in exams. We remember learning about the damage of fossil fuels, sustainable energy sources and mitigating the use of fossil fuels. However, none of the topics were able to stress the urgency and importance of climate change.

Tap Tap Trees is a mobile game developed by 17-year-olds Debi Ahitov, Irmak Kaşıkcı and Dafne Sarfati to raise awareness about reforestation and improved air quality efforts. As part of the game, users pass levels by planting trees. (Courtesy of Technovation)

Why do you think it’s important for students to learn STEM skills in school?

STEM subjects increase students’ strategic thinking, problem solving and analytical thinking skills, which are skills needed to understand world problems and to take actions against them. Also, since most STEM subjects are fact- and logic-based, these subjects increase the students’ ability to trust factual information, which is also critical in analyzing world problems (or believing them).

TECO, Kazakhstan

s19-year-old Dana, 18-year-old Dilnaz, 18-year-old Lyubov and 17-year-old Malika created this interactive 3D mobile game to encourage users to make sustainable behavioural change. TECO challenges the gamer to prevent and solve ecological issues and provides useful information in the process.

What do you hope to achieve through TECO?

Our ultimate goal was to educate children and youth about the environment by using the accessible tools. That is why we created a mobile 3D game that focuses on the environmental impact of humanity's actions and the eco-consciousness of individuals. By playing the game, the user tries to prevent various ecological disasters and eliminate their consequences and gain the special points to exchange them later for partner benefits. Moreover, the game also has the step counter, which shows the decrease of carbon footprint, and the tool for tracking the recycling activities, which is connected to our devices in the recycling bins. By developing this app, we wanted to show people that eco-friendliness starts from education and the individual’s actions.

What has been the impact of TECO since you released it?

We received a huge feedback from our local community and found out that both youth and companies were genuinely interested in our solution. We also got a lot of comments and recommendations on how we can improve that, and we really appreciated this connection with our audience. Despite the fact that the project is on hold now, we sparkled interest in STEM in our region and received many messages from students and especially girls who wanted to build something by themselves too. They mostly wanted to get advice on how to start on Technovation and similar contests, and we were very pleased by the fact that we could empower them with our story.

Is climate change and how you can help fight it a topic that Kazakhstan schools teach? What did you learn about climate change in school?

Climate change and environmental problems are widely discussed topics in our school in many classes. Our school emphasizes the importance of awareness of students regarding urgent global issues, teaching us to take initiative. We learned through many individual research projects and school events that the awareness and lack of action are the main causes of environmental problems, and later they became the central topic of our app.

19-year-old Dana, 18-year-old Dilnaz, 18-year-old Lyubov and 17-year-old Malika (pictured) created an interactive 3D mobile game to encourage users to make sustainable behavioural change. (Courtesy of Technovation)

Why do you think it’s important for students to learn STEM skills in school?

STEM knowledge allows young people to implement their ideas in real life as technology-based solutions are the top choice now. Learning STEM skills like programming and robotics engineering allowed us to create both software and hardware parts of the project and make it competitive in its field, and we believe that all school students can do it.

Why do you think it’s important for young people’s voices to be heard in the fight against climate change?

Youth often has powerful ideas but lacks the instruments to implement them. The younger generations become more and more eco-conscious, and it is essential to provide them with opportunities to make the world a better place. Startup events, mentorship programs and other initiatives allow young girls like us to use our creativity now, not in the abstract future.

ClimAx, Nigeria

Developed by 19-year-old Maryam Bello, 14-year-old Angel Chukwudi-Denis, 18-year-old Virginia Edor, 18-year-old Benedictha Pam and 16-year-old Fortune Somuadina, this app provides a platform to encourage users to engage in carbon-reducing activities.

Why did you and your team decide to create an app focused on addressing climate change in Nigeria?

We decided to work on climate change because most of the places we lived in had dump areas, which is a large area of ground that is used for tipping and disposal of waste material, and usually when it rains, the gutters would be flooded. We had to do something about this, so we decided to do more research and we found out we could do something about this and we decided to work on climate change. Besides that, the blockage of the gutters and drainages caused severe floods that took the life of 155 people and 25,000 displacements on 20 October, 2020. This number keeps rising annually. Also, Nigeria has an annual deforestation rate of 3.5% and is considered the highest. One major cause of this besides illegal logging is the use of firewood and charcoal to cook by women in rural areas and most of these women face threats to their health and security. In the process of fetching these firewood, some of these women get raped or assaulted. The use of open fire for cooking results in asthma, lung disease and pneumonia.

Developed by 18-year-old Benedictha Pam, 16-year-old Fortune Somuadina, 14-year-old Angel Chukwudi-Denis, 19-year-old Maryam Bello and 18-year-old Virginia Edor (pictured left to right), the ClimAx app provides a platform to encourage users to engage in carbon-reducing activities. (Courtesy of Technovation)

Through this app we hope to achieve a cleaner Nigeria and a safer place for the citizens. And create a behavioural change towards the use of plastics in Nigeria. We also hope to create awareness through our app against wrong dumping of plastics because we should reduce, reuse and recycle.

What skills did your team need in order to build ClimAx? Where did you learn those skills — in the classroom, on your own, with help from Technovation?

We needed coding skills, critical thinking skills and how to market our business. We learnt them online and with help from our Technovation mentors.

Why do you think it’s important for students to learn STEM skills in school?

I feel it's important because change that starts from the younger generation is definitely going to be sustainable, and the world is going digital, therefore students need these skills in order to be among the changes happening.

What has been the impact of ClimAx since you released it?

The impact started with us, we have been able to plant 500 trees in many schools and we have reduced our use of plastic bags.

Why do you think it’s important for young people’s voices to be heard in the fight against climate change?

Working on this project has made us understand how important our planet is to us, so we believe if we could get more young minds to work on projects like this, they would definitely come up with projects that would eliminate climate change entirely.

Treasury Water, Egypt

With severe droughts happening around the world, freshwater supply is a precious resource. 15-year-olds Nadine Abdelaziz and Nadine Tamer created an app to decrease water use at homes by monitoring and calculating water consumption and educating users how to use water wisely.

Tell us about Treasury Water and what you wanted to achieve through this app.

We created an app focusing on decreasing water use at home to create awareness about the problem of water and that each one of us should use water wisely. We hope to create more awareness about this issue and decrease water use.

Why do you think it’s important to teach people about the water crisis and water conservation?

It is a global problem. It has been addressed in our community through the press before — but it is important to continue to discuss as we will have a scarcity of freshwater in the coming years because of climate change. Our country will suffer badly soon.

15-year-olds Nadine Abdelaziz and Nadine Tamer from Egypt created the Treasury Water app to decrease water use at homes by monitoring and calculating water consumption and educating users how to use water wisely. (Courtesy of Technovation)

What skills did your team need in order to build Treasury Water? Where did you learn those skills — in the classroom, on your own, with help from Technovation?

We learned new tools like Thunkable and how to use notification and divide screens with help of Technovation.

What has been the impact of Treasury Water since you released it?

Everybody seems to like it and it was very helpful to use it for them.

What would you say to other students around the world who want to help fight climate change but don’t know where to start or don’t feel like they can make an impact?

You could start through searching for problems around you and turn your solutions into mobile applications.

Why do you think it’s important for young people’s voices to be heard in the fight against climate change?

Because they are the future generation and they have new ideas all the time.