The World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), an initiative of Qatar Foundation, has revealed the six winners of the 2019 WISE Awards.
Each year, WISE Awards recognise and promote innovative projects from across the world that address global educational challenges. This year’s winners include ‘Family Business for Education’, ‘United World Schools: Teaching the Unreached’, ‘Micro:bit Educational Foundation’, ‘Programa Criança Feliz’, ‘Arpan’s Personal Safety Education Programme’, and ‘Akilah Institute’.
According to WISE CEO Stavros N Yiannouka they are very excited to announce the 2019 WISE Awards winners. He said that each project varies in terms of project focus, geographical distribution, and reach.
The WISE Awards demonstrate once again how global organisations 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 jury and pre-jury members who did a thorough job in evaluating the projects.’
The winning projects 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 personalised early childhood education interventions based on cognitive sciences, improving child safety to eliminate sexual assault and harassment, and providing women market-relevant education to improve employability.
This year, WISE received 481 project submissions, the WISE team and a panel of pre-jurors shortlisted the submissions to 15 finalists. Six winners were selected by the WISE Awards jury after an independent assessment conducted by LEK Consulting.
Ashwin Assomull, a partner for Global Education Practice at LEK Consulting, said that the WISE Awards winners represent the best of the education sector globally, pushing the boundaries of innovation in the sector. He added that LEK was proud to once again support the assessment of the exceptional finalists for these awards.
Each winning project must be an established, innovative educational project that has 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 projects will be celebrated during the WISE Summit, which – taking place in Doha from 19 to 21 November – is being held under the theme ‘UnLearn, ReLearn: What it means to be Human’.
For updates and more information about WISE, visit wise-qatar.org.