UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon promises to fight even harder for a safer world while honouring the winner of the United Nations Art for Peace contest.

‘‘Working with and for young people is one of my top priorities,’’ said Ban.. ‘‘Youth are a transformative force with creative and enthusiastic agents of change, energetically demonstrating their capacity and desire to tackle global challenges and to make their own mark on history,’’ he added.

The Art for Peace Contest was sponsored by the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs (ODA) and the Harmony for Peace Foundation. The contest was open to youth from around the world aged between five and 17 years. Contestants were able to draw, paint, sketch, use pens, pencils, crayons, charcoal, oil, acrylic paint or watercolour for their artwork.

The online contest provided a platform for children and teenagers from all over the world to imagine a world free of nuclear weapons.

A total of 6,600 children and teenagers from 92 different countries entered in the competition. A panel of 140 juriors evaluated the art pieces based on creativity, composition, theme and technique.

Haruka Shoji, a 17-year-old Japanese student who lives in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, was the winner of the oldest category, the 13-17 age group.  .

‘‘Her beautiful painting is called “Someday” and we see a young woman looking into the distance to a better future,’’ added Secretary-General ‘‘not someday, today!’’ he added.

Shoji will receive $1,000 for her painting, while Japanese artist Ai Yamanaka will be awarded $600 for ‘Nature,’ Sutatip Maijan from Thailand will receive $400 for ‘Defense Cooperation,’ and Itzel Azalia Joya Figeroa from El Salvador will be given $200 for her work, ‘Feeding Peace.’

From the 9-12-year-old age category, the top prizes went to Malaysian artist Mok Yan Ling, Michelle Minzhi Li of the United States, Karina Pershina from Kazakhstan and Germany’s Annika Tiedemann, while the top four winners from the 5-8 years of age group are Galuh Edelweiss from Indonesia, Zhihan Lu of China, Eugene Ugolnikov from Russia, and Areen Hamad of Pakistan.

Each of the winning artists will receive art supplies donated by the Harmony for Peace Foundation.

Ban  described the inspiration that those children passed to him to fight harder for a safer world, to keep insisting that spending on education and health care is much more valuable than spending on tanks and missiles, and to keep demanding that everyone work for a world free of nuclear weapons.

‘‘I spend a great deal of time urging Governments to create a nuclear-weapon-free world for the sake of children and youth and today, I get to see how children and youth themselves envision a nuclear-weapon-free world,’’ noted Ban. ‘‘I hope that leaders around the world hear this message and they stop to consider what young people have told us through this contest,’’ he added.

A copy of the painting was presented to Ambassador Tsuneo Nishida, Permanent Representative of Japan. ‘’This moving compositions reinforce our conviction about the importance of education in disarmament and also the power of youth and the crucial rule they play in spreading the misses of peace through the world’’, said Nishida.

When describing a similar contest, held last year, called ‘’Poetry for Peace’’, Nishida noted the surprise of the number of responses and advertisement posted on Facebook and Twitter.

‘’When raising global awareness on disarmament and nonproliferation issues we should not undermine the power of technology, especially that of social media,’’ he added.

‘‘I promise I will do everything possible to make your beautiful painting a vision of the present, not the future — so that you can be the one waving bye to nuclear weapons and entering a safer world,’’ noted Secretary-General on his final words.