The winners were chosen for their innovative and impactful solutions to education issues.
Qatar Foundation’s international initiative, the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), has announced the six winners of 2021 WISE Awards.
The six were chosen for their innovative and impactful solution to education issues, and they will now be joining the 78 additional projects that have been honoured since the beginning of the programme in 2009.
From India, the Delhi Government’s Happiness Curriculum collaborated with Dream a Dream and other NGOs to create segments in education curricula dedicated to well-being, happiness, mindfulness, critical thinking, and other social-emotional skills.
Their work has impacted 800,000 students in 1,024 schools who, as a result of the project, became more involved and focused in class. The project also saw positive results in teachers who began prioritising these values over academic success and become more collaborative with their peers.
In the UK, Onebillion was able to develop a complete edtech solution tablet and app to achieve better refined numeracy and literacy skills for children in their own native languages. The app provides children with adapted and personalised learning sessions.
The tablet also has an environmental upside to it. It can be solar-charged and is designed to be used in remote environments.
Over in Turkey, Trauma Informed Schools (TIS) focused on trauma-informed education within Turkish public schools.
TIS transforms the classroom into a safe space for children suffering from traumatic experiences to heal and communicate. It applies a multi-faceted approach to target both children and the community surrounding them, through trainings and workshops with educational staff and caregivers.
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In almost a year, between October 2019 and September 2020, the initiative was able to directly reach 5,216 children, 406 teachers, and 190 caregivers.
In South America, the Columbian Let’s All Learn to Read developed an innovative and all-inclusive model for teaching literacy for elementary school students.
Teachers were provided with reading materials, training, and a grading system to allow all students with or without learning difficulties to reach average reading levels.
The programme has helped 703,277 children and teachers from public schools in Colombia and Panama, where it has been adopted as a public policy.
Orenda Project’s Taleemabad (Urdu for ‘city of education’) over in Pakistan, won a prize for for injecting digital technologies into Pakistan’s classrooms, providing highly personalised and contextualised content that aligns with the nation’s curriculum and which teaches children English, Urdu, Math, and Science across the K-6 spectrum.
Taleemabad was able to improve educational outcomes for students, but also provide sustainability amid increasing school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic by collaborating with low-cost private schools and providing a low-touch model.
Back to Latin America, where Telefonica Foundation and “La Caixa” Foundation’s ProFuturo Digital Education Program was able to create a digital education software designed to be utilised in vulnerable environments, even without connectivity.
ProFuturo helps to fortify and support teachers in their practice and digital skills to offer the best education to their students.
The project has been implemented in 40 countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, and has helped more than 914,000 teachers and 19.7 million children.
These six projects will be celebrated during the WISE Global Summit taking place from 7-9 December in Doha. The theme of this year’s summit is “Generation Unmute: Reclaiming our Future through Education”.
The World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) is an international, multi-sectoral platform for creative thinking, debate, and purposeful action on building the future of education through collaboration.
Every year, the WISE Awards honours six successful innovative projects that address global educational challenges. Since 2009, WISE has received more than 4,200 applications from over 150 countries.
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