The World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), revealed the five ‘EdTech’ initiatives chosen to join its 2018-2019 WISE Accelerator programme. WISE is an initiative of Qatar Foundation.
The five 2018-2019 WISE Accelerator initiatives will kick off the programme during the WISE@NewYork Forum on 22 September in New York, where representatives of the five initiatives will take part in workshops, attend classes and participate in pitching sessions.
The WISE Accelerator team will also organise high-level meetings between the representatives with leaders and entrepreneurs from organisations that are developing solutions and programmes in education and EdTech.
Mursal Hedayat, co-founder and Director of Chatterbox, a member of the newly-selected WISE Accelerator cohort, said they look forward to working with the team and its incredible network of mentors and partners to bring Chatterbox to life.
WISE Accelerator Programme
The WISE Accelerator supports the development of innovative education technology initiatives that has high potential to make a positive impact. Selected initiatives receive support from mentors and WISE partners to scale up their startups, improve their international visibility, and identify potential partners, donors, and investors through networking opportunities organised by WISE.
Outlining the benefits of being part of WISE Accelerator, Chibeza Agley, co-founder and CEO of CamBioScience, a member of the programme’s 2017-2018 cohort, said that WISE Accelerator made a ‘profound’ impact on the development and scale-up of CamBioScience.
The programme provided our team with hand-picked mentors whose profile and experience matched the needs of our business, and the level of expert support we received from our selected mentors and from the WISE Accelerator management team over the last year has been phenomenal. The mentors on the programme are leading figures in EdTech and business, and are fully committed to helping us to grow and succeed.
Agley said that as a result of WISE Accelerator, they were successful in raising seed funding, and were able to identify and appoint a key business advisor. They also had the opportunity to explore crucial international markets and receive advice on how to refine their international scale-up strategy.
Nayla Fahed Zreik, co-founder of Lebanese Alternative Learning, an NGO based in Lebanon and also a member of the programme’s 2017-18 cohort, said the WISE Accelerator not only accelerated their business, it also accelerated their minds.
You will never think in the same way after a few sessions with your mentor. The WISE mentorship process will provide you with potential solutions tailored to your business.’
The 2018-2019 WISE Accelerator Initiatives
ScholarX: A social impact startup based in Nigeria, ScholarX enables African youth to access education through various education financing solutions, regardless of their socio-economic background. ScholarX offers a scholarship aggregator mobile/web app, which has over 10,000 local and foreign-targeted scholarships. It also provides a micro-scholarship crowdfunding platform called ‘the Village’ that connects local students with tuition funding sponsors worldwide.
Chatterbox: Based in the UK, Chatterbox is a language-tutoring platform created and delivered by refugees. Chatterbox finds, trains, and then contracts highly-skilled refugees to deliver language training to their clients. Chatterbox tackles the problem of unemployment amongst refugee populations, turning what would usually be considered a barrier to refugee employment – their native language – into an asset.
ImBlaze: An initiative of the Big Picture Company, a US-based NGO, ImBlaze is an online management platform that enables educators and students to easily and efficiently manage out-of-school internship experiences, to support real-world, personalised learning. It supports students to look for an internship, and once the internship starts, the educator in school and the mentor in the workplace accompany the student in the learning process.
SmartScience: Another US-based startup, SmartScience provides students with an online platform that facilitates learning in the sciences. The company developed a technology that allows students to test a hypothesis by measuring results on videos of real-world experiments. SmartScience offers over 300 lessons in the sciences, and every lesson is designed with the goal of fostering the learning of the experimentation method among students.
Uptale: Uptale is a French startup that offers a software-as-a-service platform to enable creators to imagine, create, publish, and monitor immersive learning experiences using Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technology. Uptale allows anyone – without any technical background or prior training – to create gamified interactive VR and AR learning content and publish it using the Uptale platform.
Find out more about these initiatives through this link: wise-qatar.org/wise-accelerator.