Third place in the Giga Photo Award 2026

‘If we talk about this month, this is a completely normal day,’ says mathematics teacher Olena Loboda. Because of the morning’s air-raid alert she is teaching an empty classroom over a laptop. Chernihiv, Ukraine, October 2025.

The photograph of Olena Loboda teaching mathematics to an empty classroom in Chernihiv has been awarded third place in the single-image category of the Giga Photo Award 2026. The theme this year was The Urgency of Connectivity; the award drew 4,747 images from 97 countries.

Giga is a joint initiative of UNICEF and the ITU working to get every school in the world online, which gives the competition an unusual centre of gravity: connectivity as infrastructure for survival rather than convenience. Roughly half the world’s schools are still offline and an estimated 1.3 billion children have no internet at home. Olena’s classroom is at the sharp end of that: without the connection there is no lesson at all, only an empty room.

The 2026 jury was Adeleh Mojtahed (Giga/ITU), Ala Kheir, Samantha Clark of National Geographic, Tessa Asamoah of UNHCR and Veejay Villafranca, alongside two student jurors from HEAD-Genève.

The winning work is exhibited outdoors at the Promenade Saint-Antoine in Geneva from 25 June to 2 August, and at the University of Geneva from 5 to 16 October.

The fuller story behind the picture is here.