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 lived, relied upon, and sustained in everyday life, particularly in fragile, crisis‑affected, and rapidly changing contexts.

Giga is a joint partnership between UNICEF and ITU to connect 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 critical lifeline for education, health, safety, and participation. Yet millions remain disconnected. The urgency is no longer abstract. It is lived.

The Giga Photo Award builds on this reality by using photography to make visible the human impact of digital access and exclusion. Through single images and extended visual narratives, the award seeks work that moves beyond infrastructure to examine connection as a social condition that shapes resilience, care, learning, belonging, and survival.