Guyana’s 2024 Youth Environmental Speaker Gabriella Arjun of Queens College stated that she was always passionate about the environment and in this regard, she brainstormed the idea of creating a hydroponic kitchen garden for her school.
The 10th-grade student who on Wednesday won the SHOUT 2.0 competition posited that the project is aimed at significantly reducing food wastage, minimizing pollution, and using less water when compared to conventional farming among other benefits.
“Initially, I had pitched the hydroponic kitchen garden project, this was to minimise food wastage, promote sustainable consumption and production, also minimise pollution compared to traditional soil planting methods, conserve water, and use little labour.”
She noted that the produce grown from this project will be used in the school’s cafeteria to provide healthy meals for students while underscoring that if this project was implemented on a larger scale, it would significantly impact the country.
Additionally, Arjune shared some words of encouragement for the next batch of students who will be competing for Guyana’s Youth Environmental Speaker next year.
“I just want to say, if you are passionate about the environment, it will naturally come to you just do your research and make sure you are environmentally aware of what’s going on in the news, you will have anxiety to deal with but the people there are so nice, so that will somewhat ease that tension,” she posited.
Meanwhile, Queens College received a cheque of $500,000 from Recover Guyana and its partners to kickstart the project along with $250,000 for technical expertise and another $250,000 from kind support making the total amount of funds received by the school to implement the project a whopping $1 million.
Recover Guyana in collaboration with Exxon Mobil Guyana on June 5, 2024, in observance of World Environment Day kickstarted their annual ‘SHOUT’ competition at the Georgetown Ramada Princess Hotel.
This event saw several secondary schools from across Guyana engaging in dialogues about various environmental issues and saw the top 10 out of 30 schools who secured their spots in this year’s qualifier delivering live speeches on various environmental issues.
Other winners and participants of the competition received $3 million in cash and prizes. SHOUT aims to involve more young people in environmental action, encourage dialogue, and initiate improvements in school environments and is supported by ExxonMobil Guyana among other companies.
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