Giga is pleased to announce the Giga Photo Award 2026, centered on the theme “The Urgency of Connectivity.” The award invites photographers from around the world to document how digital connection is experienced, depended upon, and sustained in everyday life — especially within fragile, crisis-affected, and rapidly changing environments.

Giga is a joint partnership between UNICEF and ITU dedicated to connecting every school to the internet and every young person to information, opportunity, and choice. As conflict, climate shocks, displacement, and inequality intensify, connectivity has become a vital lifeline for education, healthcare, safety, and civic participation. Yet millions remain disconnected. The urgency is no longer theoretical — it is lived reality.

The Giga Photo Award builds on this mission by using photography to reveal the human impact of digital access and exclusion. Through single images and extended visual narratives, the award seeks work that goes beyond infrastructure to explore connection as a social condition shaping resilience, care, learning, belonging, and survival.

Submissions will be accepted via Picter from February 17 to March 17, 2026, across three categories:
• Single Image
• Junior Visual Storyteller
• Multiple Image

Participants may submit personal or professional work responding to the theme, including photographs that show how individuals and communities adapt, remain connected, or rebuild digital access across distance, disruption, and uncertainty. This may include moments where connectivity influences education, health, emotional well-being, safety, climate response, civic engagement, or mutual aid.

Entries will be reviewed by an international jury of leading photographers, editors, and visual practitioners. Jury sessions will take place in Geneva on March 26–27, 2026, and will include participation from two student jurors in collaboration with HEAD-Genève. Selected works will be exhibited in Geneva in June and October 2026, with the awards ceremony held in June.

Through this second edition, the Giga Photo Award positions connectivity as a matter of equity and urgency — and photography as a powerful medium to document, question, and expand how we understand what it means to be connected today.

Prizes include:

Single Image
First Prize: $2,500 Giga Photo Fellowship + mentorship
Second Prize: $1,500 + portfolio review by a National Geographic editor
Third Prize: $500

Junior Visual Storyteller
First Prize: Mentorship + iPad (ART Computer)
Second Prize: Portfolio review by a National Geographic editor
Third Prize: Photobook

Multiple Image
First Prize: $3,000 Giga Photo Fellowship + mentorship + MacBook (ART Computer)
Second Prize: $1,000 + portfolio review by a National Geographic editor
Third Prize: $500

Image: Sudip Maiti