By Yunus S Saliu
St Joseph’s Senior Secondary School in Banjul has emerged as one of the global winners of the prestigious Seeds of Hope for a Better Future 2025 competition, an international initiative supported by UNESCO that promotes peace, culture, and sustainability through creative arts.
The competition, which attracted schools from around the world, announced winners from The Gambia, France, the United Kingdom, Haiti, and Kenya. It challenged students from pre-school to high school to submit artworks, stories, and performances highlighting themes of peace-building, climate change, and community resilience.
St Joseph’s won in the Artworks Category with its entry, Campaign for a Sustainable Banjul, inspired by the city’s collaboration with Ostend in Belgium to tackle climate change. The Grade 12 students produced a series of paintings that judges described as “a most deserving and robust winner.”
Other winning schools included Oak View Primary in Hertfordshire, UK, for its Faces of Feeling sculptures; Jardin d’Enfants des Nations Unies in Paris for Wind of Peace; Lyng Hall Secondary School, UK, for The Heart Shaped Hole; and collaborative digital and performance projects from schools in Haiti, Kenya, and across the UK.
The distinguished judging panel featured leading artists, writers, and cultural figures, including sculptor Sir Antony Gormley, author Edmund de Waal, actor Hugh Quarshie, and broadcaster Dame Liz Forgan.
Winners shared a £5,000 prize fund supported by the Hochhauser Foundation, while all participating schools received a newly published book, Seeds, donated by Prestel Publishing.
Launched under UNESCO’s Associated Schools Programme Network (ASPnet), which connects more than 12,000 institutions worldwide, the competition inspired young people to embrace creativity as a pathway to peace and sustainability.
Ann Beatty, UNESCO ASPnet UK National Coordinator, described the quality of entries as “extraordinary,” while judge Jannette Cheong praised the winners for showing that “young people around the world understand the value of peace and tolerant relationships between cultures.”
Commenting on this achievement, the National ASPnet Coordinator, Mr Lamin Jarjou of the Gambia National Commission for UNESCO, expressed his delight and stated that St. Joseph’s Senior Secondary School is an active member of the UNESCO Associated network of schools in the country. Their commitment is what yielded such a result.
He also thanked ASPnet UK for providing such opportunities to ASPnet Schools in The Gambia.
However, the Gambian achievement places St Joseph’s School among a select group of global winners whose creativity has been recognised as planting true Seeds of Hope for a sustainable and peaceful future.
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By Yunus S Saliu St Joseph’s Senior Secondary School in Banjul has emerged as one of the global winners of…
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