Tipp students at science showcase

County Tippperary teenagers joined students from across Ireland at a special showcase event for young science innovators, that was hosted at the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin, last week.

Rebecca Jordan and Sarah Ryan from Coláiste Mhuire Co-Ed were amongst the students selected from the entrants at this year’s BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition to exhibit their project at a special ‘Science for Development’ showcase that was organised by Development organisation Self Help Africa.

The Irish charity organise the ‘Science for Development Award’ at the BT Young Scientist event each year, to encourage science students to devise projects that look at challenges and issues that affect people living in the Developing World. The award-winners at the BT event receive a bursary, sponsored by Irish Aid, to travel with Self Help Africa on an annual schools study visit to a country where it is working.

Last week’s student showcase assembled more than a dozen projects that the event’s organisers believed could make a valuable contribution within a global development setting.

“Each year we try to celebrate not just the winner of the annual ‘Science for Development Award’, but also an array of innovative student projects that could have such an application, and are worthy of recognition” explained Self Help Africa’s event organiser, Dorothy Jacob.

Rebecca Jordan and Sarah Ryan’s – Period Poverty: An investigation into social and economic reasons for a stigma surrounding menstruation and women.– was one such project.

Amongst the other exhibitors at last week’s event were the 2023 winners of the ‘Science for Development Award’ – two students from Sutton Park School in Dublin whose project devised a blood filtering device to diagnose blood-borne diseases - together with projects from Limerick, Galway, Cork, Westmeath, Donegal and Tipperary.

Minister of State for Overseas Development Aid and Diaspora Sean Fleming, who opened the event, said that it provided young people with a fantastic opportunity to develop an idea and turn it into something practical. “It’s a case of doing something local that has a global impact,” he said, adding that he would encourage students and teachers across the country to think about some of these challenges and issues when they were developing their entries to the BT Young Scientist Exhibition in the future.

Self Help Africa’s acting CEO, David Dalton, praised all of the exhibitors at the showcase, and said that the event highlighted both the great work of the students involved, but also demonstrated the huge contribution that young people could play, now and in the future, to support people in poorer regions of the world.

“In our work we see ourselves as being a bridge between scientific knowledge and rural families who are looking to increase productivity and profitability of our farm work,” he said. ‘This event too shows how scientific knowledge is important to helping the poorest and the most marginalised around the world.”

Self Help Africa’s annual ‘Science for Development Award’ is part of a national programme of Global Citizenship Education activities that the charity run in Ireland. To find out more about their education programme visit: www.selfhelpafrica.org or e-mail schools@selfhelpafrica.org