A new award made to a student design and using an ancient metal casting technique, will be presented to the winners of the 2024 ‘Science for Development Award’ at this week’s BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition.

The winners of the Irish Aid sponsored prize will receive a €7,000 travel bursary together with a new perpetual trophy, which has been created using recycled bronze and aluminium, to the design devised by 16 year old Noemi Karska, a student at Loreto High School, Beaufort. Noemi was picked as the winner in a design competition, last year. 

The ‘Science for Development Award’ is organised annually by Self Help Africa, and is awarded by the adjudicators to a project that addresses a particular development challenge that affects people living in poorer countries of the world. 

The trophy will be presented to the 2024 winner by Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs Sean Fleming, BT Young Scientist Exhibition on Friday. 

“I wanted my design to illustrate how we must all work together, and how societies that have resources must be prepared to share them with those who do not,” Noemi says. She worked with Wicklow artist Fiona Coffey to create the finished trophy.

Winners of the ‘Science for Development Award’ for the years 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 travelled recently with Self Help Africa to Zambia.

Programme coordinator Dorothy Jacob said that travel restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic had led to the trip being deferred for successive years, but that a group of students and teachers had travelled last October, and had met with communities, academics and had visited cultural sites, while they had been guests at a reception that was hosted by the Irish Ambassador to Zambia.

A report on their visit was published in The Irish Times newspaper here.

Find out more about Self Help Africa’s Irish Aid sponsored Science for Development Award and wider Global Citizenship Programme here.