Three Indian Projects Shortlisted For The 2019 Wise Awards
New Delhi: The World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) announced the 15 finalists for the 2019 WISE Awards, among which the Indian projects Dost Education, CareerAware and Personal Safety Education Program were selected.
Dost Education’s mission is to empower parents of any literacy level to take charge of their child’s early development and lifelong learning. By putting parents at the center of early childhood development, Dost’s vision is to unlock every child’s full potential – regardless of their family’s wealth or literacy level. Dost builds software, audio content, and toolkits for schools to promote parent engagement and holistic child development.
Sneha Sheth, CEO of Dost Education, commented: “As a finalist for the WISE Awards, we are proud to see early learning and edtech gain recognition at such a global level. We are also thrilled to learn from our fellow finalists about how we can transform kids’ trajectories through education.”
CareerAwareis a 2-year career guidance and decision-making program for students in grades 9 and 10 and their families, that is run through the school system by trained career facilitators. It ensures students’ access to career counselling, awareness of their career options and informed decision-making about their future jobs.
Today, 40,000 students have been counselled through this tool and resulting in 76% of them with a clearer career plan and 90% showing an intent to stay in education until at least grade 12.
Priya Agrawal, Founder and Director of the Antarang Foundation, said: “We are absolutely delighted to be selected as a finalist for the WISE Awards 2019 ! Antarang’s CareerAware is an innovative career planning program that enables adolescents envision the steps she needs to take to transition safely from secondary school onto higher/vocational education.”
The Personal Safety Education Programis 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, commented: “I am very excited and honoured to be a finalist for the WISE Awards 2019. It’s a great opportunity to showcase how social issues like child abuse can be addressed through education based innovative programmes that have the power to impact childhoods significantly. I look forward to the process and hope we emerge as one of the winners as it’ll bring to the forefront a model that can be replicated by countries over the world and will able to protect millions of children from child abuse.”
The 15 finalists projects come from 9 countries and were selected by a pre-Jury of international experts. They tackle a number of pressing educational issues including: early childhood education; girls’ education; coding and digital skills; innovative higher educational models; providing education to marginalized population; improving teacher training and motivation, education in emergencies; career counselling; stimulating critical thinking and creativity; and alternative ways of learning for employment.
Stavros N. Yiannouka, CEO of WISE, said: “Each of the 2019 WISE Awards finalists has built an effective, tested solution to a global educational challenge. Whether ensuring access to fundamental early childhood education or preparing children for the 21st Century workplace, each project is already transforming children’s lives, and provides an inspirational model for others to adopt. This is vital to our mission at WISE, which centres around celebrating and enabling innovation in education.”
Rounding out the 2019 Finalists are, Micro:bit Educational Foundation (UK), United World Schools: Teaching the Unreached (UK), Akilah Institute (USA), Family Business for Education (UK), MyMachine (Belgium), Stawisha Leadership Institute (Kenya), OpenClassrooms (France), ReBootKamp (Jordan), Peer Coaching Plan (China), Moringa School (Kenya), Institut de l’Engagement (France) and Programa Criança Feliz (Brazil).
The 2019 Finalists were selected from a pool of 482 submissionsevaluated according to strict criteria. They must be established, innovative educational projects 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 WISE Awards winning projects will be announced in July 2019 and celebrated at the World Innovation Summit for Education, November 19-21 2019, in Doha, Qatar. In addition to publicity and networking opportunities, each initiative will receive $20,000 (US).