Awards of up to $100,000 allow small companies from Ghana, DR Congo and Uganda to grow their projects

Centrepiece of Day 2 at RewirEd Summit - driving innovative, radical change in global education

DUBAI, UAE / ACCESSWIRE / December 13, 2021 / Three innovative African education projects have been awarded major cash injections on Day Two of the RewirEd Summit, the ground-breaking three-day event at Expo 2020 Dubai aiming to drive the innovative, radical change needed in education.

$100,000 was awarded to Rudolf Ampopo, CEO of Craft Education in Ghana, a teletherapy platform that allows African parents and teachers to help children with learning difficulties, such as autism, to develop proper communication, social interaction and academic skills so they can thrive in school and life.

SOLAR-FI from the DR Congo was awarded $70,000, while Yiya Air Science from Uganda received $40,000. The awards will allow them to grow their projects and so help combat the crisis in learning exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a day dominated by some of the most important leaders in the field of global education seeking to find innovative new ways of educating children and young people, six bold experiments - "RewirEd Provocations" - were each awarded $50,000 seed funding to allow them to further develop, test and roll-out new education initiatives.

Dr Tariq Al Gurg, CEO of Dubai Cares, the RewirEd Summit hosts said: "All the awards announced today will help jump-start the rewiring of education systems to meet the momentous challenges presented by the rapidly changing world and so help ensure greater opportunities for younger people."

The RewirEd Summit is taking place against a backdrop of COVID-19 threatening to turn a progressively worsening learning crisis into a generational catastrophe. At the height of the pandemic, 1.6 billion students were out of school and tens of millions have yet to go back. Now the Omicron variant threatens to wreak yet more havoc to education in the places that can least afford it.

Driving the debate at the summit on why innovation in education is necessary and what it should look like were leaders including Stefania Giannini, UNESCO's Assistant Director-General for Education; Henrietta Fore, Executive Director at UNICEF; Andreas Schleicher, Director of Education & Skills at the OECD; Michael Kocher, GM of the Aga Khan Foundation; and Essie North, CEO of Big Change.

However, they were joined by guests as diverse as Clarence Seedorf, the highly decorated former Dutch international footballer and now an entrepreneur and philanthropist who champions the transformative impact sport can have on academic achievement and developing life skills; leading Pakistani artist, Zara Mahmoud; and Emtithal Mahmoud, the Sudanese-American poet and UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador who passionately believes in the effect of storytelling and access to literature.

They and leaders and experts from many other organisations addressed fundamental issues, including:

• When COVID-19 struck and schools all around the world closed, the need for flexible teaching solutions suddenly became paramount. But, with many schools still not having re-opened and the Omicron variant likely to have a huge impact, what emergency solutions worked best and how can they be best up-scaled for maximum impact?
• How innovative, non-formal education and alternative learning can meet the needs and rights of the 258 million children not enrolled in school before the pandemic, including those affected by emergencies
• Why digital learning needs not just to be implemented, but implemented at huge scale with a focus on equitable system-wide change
• How teachers on the front line and their ideas have to be placed at the heart new initiatives to help ensure their success
• As Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are predicted to grow exponentially in education, making sure these new technologies are available as far and wide as possible to children
• Practical ways in which the education of girls and the empowerment of women can be furthered within societies dominated by deep patriarchal, social and political structures, including cultural and religious ones
• How education needs to be prioritized as a solution to climate change

Further information

• Please contact rewired@markettiers.com

SOURCE: RewirEd Summit