Chinese photojournalist Xie Hailong won the Anti-poverty Achievement Award for a photo titled "I Want to Go to School" that he took in 1991.

Xie said winning the contest 20 years ago has changed his mentality and he would prefer to devote more to poverty allevitation cause than winning contests. [Maverick Chen / China.org.cn]

"I am pleased that my photos may have changed the society in raising people's awareness of education in rural and poverty-stricken parts of China," he said, promising to donate all his prize money to Hope Project.

Xie's works featuring students in rural classrooms have become the icon of the China's Project Hope education charity. Xie said he will donate his US$5,000 prize money to the charity.

Italian photographer Stefano De Luigi won the Editorial Images Best Professional Stories Award for "Drought in Kenya," which shows a drought stricken wilderness where a giraffe lies dead on a dirt road.

De Luigi said he wished to help bringing attention to poverty in Africa, adding the current drought in the Horn of Africa is a new round of human-environmental crisis that may be even worse than in Kenya.