2025 High School Winners

Ha Vy Le is in the 11th grade at Collège Miles Macdonell Collegiate in Winnipeg, Canada. She found out about the contest through an account on Instagram that shares opportunities for students. She thought the World of 8 Billion video contest “would be a great opportunity to learn more about the issues our world is facing and to explore her creative side during the process.”

Her motivation to create a video about sanitation came after learning about the number of people globally that have to boil their water and do not have adequate access to a toilet. She knew that the global population was growing at a fast rate but was surprised to learn some of the impacts of that growth. For example, she learned that over 1.5 billion people still don’t have basic sanitation services and that 419 million people still defecate in the open, which is linked to diseases like cholera, dysentery, and typhoid.

Most of Ha Vy’s previous film creation has been for personal use in the past; she’s never created a video for a competiton. She found coming up with how she was going to present the information the most difficult part of the process. Her advice to future contest participants is to give yourself enough time to edit and refine your video before the deadline. She also shared that she got a lot of inspiration from watching past winners of the competition so recommends everyone check them out before starting.

Ha Vy likes to volunteer with clubs and fundraise at her school. She is trying to start her own club to help people in need in Vietnam, where she is from originally. She looks up to her mom and dad and often asks “what they would do” when she is in tough situations. She is planning on majoring in engineering in university and is also trying to start her own business by the time she is 18. Ha Vy plans on continuing to create videos in the future and started a YouTube channel with the goal of having 5,000 followers by the end of the year.