Beyond Borders: Leveraging Social Media for South-South Development

It started with curiosity. In 2016, my desire to understand the world pushed me to reach out, through broken English and Google Translate, to people across the globe. This wasn't just about making friends; it was a cultural exchange that slowly reshaped my perspective.

That curiosity soon found a purpose. I connected with the IDCO Center, a Palestinian NGO in Gaza, and began helping them gain recognition within the Chilean-Palestinian community. Around the same time, I became fascinated by aquaponics—a brilliant, symbiotic system that grows fish and plants together while conserving water.

By a beautiful coincidence, I discovered a group of students from the Islamic University of Gaza who had just won an award for innovating that very technology. I reached out, and from that single message, a collaboration was born. We formed a digital workgroup with students in biotechnology, chemistry, and aquaculture. My role was to create content and share global success stories, while they worked to build demonstration units. Together, we taught classes that ignited the imaginations of young students—first in a school in Gaza, and then in my own city of Quillota, Chile.

This grassroots effort, born on Facebook, soon caught the attention of local NGOs and eventually the Quillota Municipal Innovation Office. While our joint proposal for an “Aquaponics in My Neighborhood” project wasn’t funded that year, the real success was already proven. We had built a genuine bridge for South-South cooperation, proving that a simple desire to connect and share knowledge can overcome vast distances and cultural differences. The municipal officials were amazed not just by the technology, but by the story itself: that from a simple click of a "friend request" could grow a tangible project uniting two communities across the world.