World Innovation Summit for Education revealed the six winners of the 2019 WISE Awards – India Education Diary
New Delhi: The World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), an initiative of Qatar Foundation (QF), has revealed the six winners of the 2019 WISE Awards. Each year, the WISE Awards recognize and promote six innovative projects from across the world that address global educational challenges.
The Personal Safety Education Program, run by Indian organization Arpan, is among the six WISE Awards winners this year. The Personal Safety Education Program is Arpan’s flagship life-skills education program that provides children with knowledge and skills to participate in their safety in an unsafe situation. It empowers children, works with adult caregivers to create awareness and supports children by providing them with counselling, a safe-space for disclosure and the skills to identify, refuse and report unsafe situations. A total of 200,000 children and adults have been impacted by the program since its creation.
Pooja Taparia, CEO of Arpan, stated: “We are honoured to win the WISE Award. This recognition will bring immense credibility to our impactful work and help us build global partnerships to scale our work.”
The other 2019 WISE Awards winners include: Family Business for Education (Street Child) (UK/Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Liberia), United World Schools: Teaching the Unreached (UK/Cambodia, Nepal and Myanmar), Micro:bit Educational Foundation (UK/Global), Programa Criança Feliz (Brazil) and Akilah Institute (USA/Rwanda).
Stavros N. Yiannouka, CEO of WISE congratulated the winners: “We are very excited to announce the 2019 WISE Awards winning projects. Each project varies in terms of project focus, geographical distribution and reach. The WISE Awards demonstrate once again how global organizations and governments can tackle pressing education challenges with innovative solutions in sustainable and scalable ways. I would like to take this opportunity to thank our Awards jury and pre-jury members who did a thorough job in evaluating the projects.”
This year, WISE received 481 project submissions, the WISE team and a panel of pre-jurors shortlisted the submissions to 15 finalists. The six winners were selected by the WISE Awards Jury after an independent assessment conducted by L.E.K Consulting. Each winning project must be an established, innovative educational project that have already demonstrated a transformative impact on individuals, communities, and society of their context. They also need to be financially stable, have a clear development plan, and be scalable and replicable.
The winning projects innovatively tackle a number of pressing educational issues including financing education, providing access to education in remote and underprivileged areas, promoting coding across different geographical locations, implementing personalized early childhood education interventions based on cognitive sciences, and providing women market relevant education to improve employability.
The projects will be celebrated during the WISE Global Summit from November 19- 21, 2019 in Doha, Qatar. The theme of the global Summit is “UnLearn, ReLearn: What it means to be Human”. In addition to publicity and networking opportunities, each will receive $20,000 (US).