Awards & Honours Quiz: UNESCO and United Nations Awards

UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, has its headquarters at Place de Fontenoy in Paris, France. Its Constitution was signed in London in November 1945 and came into force in November 1946, and India was among the founding members.

The Kalinga Prize honours writers, editors, lecturers, film makers and broadcasters who explain science, research and technology to the general public, and it is awarded by UNESCO.

Biju Patnaik, the aviator and industrialist who later became Chief Minister of Odisha, gave the endowment in 1951 that allowed UNESCO to create the prize, and it was named after the ancient kingdom of Kalinga in that region, where the Mauryan emperor Ashoka fought the war that changed him.

UNESCO is the specialised agency of the United Nations for education, the sciences, culture, communication and information, with its headquarters at Paris.

The UNESCO Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize was instituted in 1997 and honours a person or an organisation that has defended freedom of the press, often at great personal risk.

The prize was created in 1995, a year that marked both the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations and the hundred and twenty fifth birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, and it is named after Madanjeet Singh, the Indian artist, writer and diplomat who endowed it.

The prize was instituted by the General Assembly in 1966 and first awarded in 1968, which was observed as the International Year for Human Rights and marked twenty years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Champions of the Earth was launched in 2005 by the United Nations Environment Programme, whose headquarters are at Nairobi in Kenya, and it recognises leaders from government, civil society and business whose work protects the environment, in categories such as policy leadership, entrepreneurial vision and science and innovation.

The United Nations Population Award was instituted by the General Assembly in 1981 and first presented in 1983, when Indira Gandhi of India was one of the two individual laureates, honoured for India's early work on population policy.

The award has been given since 1954 by the refugee agency of the United Nations to a person, group or organisation that has served refugees, displaced people or those without a state.

UNESCO presents the King Sejong Literacy Prize and the Confucius Prize for Literacy every year on 8 September, the day it observes as International Literacy Day, and the prizes reward governments, organisations and individuals whose programmes have spread reading and writing.

The Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage was adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO in 1972, and countries that join it nominate sites of outstanding universal value, which a committee then inscribes on the World Heritage List as cultural, natural or mixed sites.