Nominations open for WSA Global Award

WSA selects and promotes local digital innovation improving society. It is a non-monetary award system with a focus on sustainable knowledge transfer through a worldwide network. Winners benefit not from a one-time financial reward, but a lifelong partnership and integration.

Categories

• WSA categories reflect the UN WSIS action lines and are updated regularly to meet the development of the UN Goals. For the edition of the WSA 2023 the categories are:

• Government & Citizen Engagement
  • The Government & Citizen Engagement category may entail solutions that:
    • Integrate the citizens in public administration & increase the citizen engagement
    • Deliver content rich solutions to the public & connect the public including individuals, businesses and organisations
    • Enable low threshold access of information, data & procedures & make public services accessible to all
    • Significantly improve and enhance service depth and quality & democratic processes
    • Increase transparency in governmental processes & facilitate participation of citizens and public services clients
    • Simplify administrations & foster efficiency of information exchange
    • Ensure equal rights to economic resources, access to basic services, ownership and control over land and other forms of property, inheritance, natural resources, appropriate new technology and financial services, including microfinance
• Health & Well Being
  • Health & Well Being solutions may address for example:
    • Meeting healthcare needs of citizens and patients with innovative content applications
    • Reduce maternal mortality ratio & preventable deaths of new-borns and children
    • Prevention & reduction of epidemics like AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, hepatitis or substance abuse
    • Supporting healthcare professionals, as well as the broader public, policy makers and healthcare providers with easy data access and communication tools & diagnosing with technical solutions & content
    • Supporting research and development of vaccines and medicines, health financing and recruitment, development, training and retention of the health workforce
    • Enable information on healthcare, nutrition, medication, disease & well-being by smart solutions
    • Solutions to learn health & well-being by improving and enhancing healthy behaviour, nutrition, hygiene, sports
    • Content rich solutions to enjoy and facilitate sports, music, entertainment, style & fashion
    • Utilizing ICTs for hobbies, free-time activities and sports
• Learning & Education
  • The Learning & Education category may entail ICT solutions that:
    • Provide intelligent solutions for easy & low threshold access of education for everyone
    • Address the learning needs of every level of learner and creating interactive e-learning communities & interactive, personalized and distributed education resources online
    • Support knowledge transfer and skills gain in a complex and interactive fashion
    • Help teachers to enhance, simplify teaching & material creation, find new methods and innovative teaching solutions using ICT’s
    • Enhance corporate training & lifelong learning
    • Foster global collaboration in science, provide measures to promote science and demonstrate results and value to society
    • Eliminate gender disparities in education and ensure equal access to all levels of education and vocational training including persons with disabilities, indigenous peoples and children in vulnerable situations
    • Provide child, disability and gender sensitive education tools and safe, non-violent, inclusive and effective learning environments
• Environment & Green Energy
  • The Environment & Green Energy category may entail ICT solutions that:
    • Support maintaining ecosystems, sustainable food production systems & resilient agricultural practices that increase productivity and production
    • Adaptation to climate change, extreme weather, drought, flooding and other disasters
    • Utilization of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge for sustainable agriculture
    • Facilitation of timely access to market information, including on food reserves
    • Supporting methods via ICT’s to progressively improve land and soil quality
    • Enhance agricultural productivity and support small-scale food producers
    • Water-use efficiency across all sectors & water resource management at all levels
    • Support and strengthen the participation in water- and sanitation, including water harvesting, desalination, water efficiency, wastewater treatment, recycling and reuse technologies
    • Enhance access to clean energy research and technology, including renewable energy, energy efficiency and advanced and cleaner fossil-fuel technology
• Culture & Heritage
  • Culture & Heritage solutions may address for example:
    • Preserving and presenting cultural heritage in line with the challenges of the future
    • Demonstrating valuable cultural assets clearly and informatively using state-of-the-art technology
    • Develop the diversity of cultures and sub-cultures and the multilingual nature of societies
    • Enabling travellers to find attractions, to be informed and enlightened, to enjoy safe travel and have access to up-to-date travel information
    • Enhance intermodal use of public transport, supporting orientation in cities and countryside, allowing the hotel industry to address customers, and providing navigation-based content
    • Promote sustainable tourism that creates jobs and promotes local culture and products
    • Safeguard and transmission of cultural heritage
    • Promote cultural diversity
• Smart Settlements & Urbanization
  • The Smart Settlements & Urbanization category may entail ICT solutions that:
    • Support higher levels of economic productivity through diversification, technological upgrading and innovation
    • Support productive employment and decent work for all women and men, including for young people and persons with disabilities, and equal pay for work of equal value
    • Offer regional and trans border infrastructure, to support economic development and human well-being
    • Enhance safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems
    • Entail inclusive and sustainable, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management
    • Solutions for safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces
    • Support positive economic, social and environmental links between urban, per-urban and rural areas
    • Solutions for financial and technical assistance, sustainable and smart buildings
    • Substantially increase the number of cities and human settlements adopting and implementing integrated policies and plans towards inclusion, resource efficiency, mitigation and
    • Support adaptation to climate change, resilience to disasters and/or risk management
    • Consumer information and/or smart access to data at all levels
• Business & Commerce
  • This category may entail ICT solutions with high social impact that:
    • support and optimization of business processes
    • are Fintech solutions with social impact
    • create new business models in e-commerce and m-commerce
    • are solutions which demonstrate an incremental or radical / disruptive innovation development
    • are applications, processes, products or business models in the financial services industry
    • are solutions with regard to their supported business processes such as financial information, payments, investments, financing, advisory and cross-process support
    • are solutions for the insurance industry (“InsurTech”), like retail, private and corporate banking as well as life and non-life insurance
    • are Business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C) or consumer-to-consumer (C2C) solutions, internet security and other areas
    • are complementary services such as personal finance management systems, or competitive solutions such as e.g. peer-to-peer lending
    • provide Data security to protect sensitive consumer and corporate financial data
• Inclusion & Empowerment
  • This category may entail ICT solutions with high social impact that:
    • support integration of the global information society, empower the social, economic and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion or economic or other status
    • empowering citizens and stakeholders in public services
    • reduce “digital divides” between technology-empowered and technology-excluded communities
    • Ensure equal opportunity and reduce inequalities, eliminating discriminatory laws, policies and practices in legislation, policies and action in this regard
    • Enhance resilience to climate-related extreme events and other economic, social and environmental shocks and disasters
    • Support mobilization of resources from a variety of sources
    • Ensure access for all everyone to food, education, information, data etc.
    • Strengthen the capacity, in particular developing countries, for early warning, risk reduction and health risks
    • Reduce discrimination against all women and girls & prevent all forms of violence against all women and girls in the public and private spheres
    • Enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women.

Eligibility Criteria

• WSA is open to any company, organisation or individual in any UN and UNESCO member state.
• The participation in the WSA Young Innovators award is restricted to any entrepreneur, company, student group or project team, where at least one of the founding members and the majority of the team is under the age of 26 (born on or after January 1, 1997) from any of the UN and UNESCO member states.

Rules

• The WSA focuses on digital applications with a strong impact on society in 8 different WSA categories, reflecting the UN SDGs. All submissions will be evaluated according to the WSA evaluation criteria.
• By submission of a project, producers accept the rules of the WSA contests as stated on this page and in the WSA Contest Database.
• All submitters to WSA have to abide by the rules and regulations mentioned in the UN Declaration on Human Rights. Submissions which encourage war, the exercise of violence, fraud, racism or discrimination will therefore not be accepted and eliminated. Similarly, submissions that violate international copyright provisions will be excluded.
• WSA cannot be held liable for accepted submissions and their contents and rights.

For more information, visit WSA (World Summit Awards).