A group of students from Fudan University were honored over the weekend for their work on a proposal to the UN to set up an international "call for help center" that would allow poverty-stricken people to ask for financial or technical assistance from charitable groups using the Internet.

 

The proposal, put forward by a group of undergraduate international relations majors at Fudan, won one of the top-three awards at the 2007 Youth Innovation Competition on Global Governance, a local event that gathered about 100 university students from around the world.

 

The proposal was submitted to Khalid Malik, UN Resident Coordinator in China, during the final competition.

 

The students said there are a large number of poverty-stricken people in the world who are in need of financial or intellectual help. While many volunteers are willing to help them, it is difficult for aid groups to match up with the needy.

 

Meanwhile, most of the UN's community aid centers are on-site, which involves high management costs and limited coverage.

 

The proposed center would involve a few global administrators, local representatives, online community managers and volunteers, the students said, noting local representatives were needed to help those without Internet access.

 

Local representatives are supposed to be local residents who have a good understanding of the community and people who being able to send out aiding request via the Internet.

 

Once the community's petition was received and approved by online community managers, the center would create an online village as well as opening up registration for volunteers to sign up for the aid campaign.

 

"The biggest advantage of this Internet-based system is that it could complete information matching automatically and reduce possible management costs that on-site centers have," said team member Qiu Dongliang.

 

The proposal was hailed by the competition's judging panel, who said that they were "excited about the sharp cost reduction the program presented."

 

(Shanghai Daily July 17, 2007)