The 2017 UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize will be awarded to the CLIx programme (India) and the GENIE programme (Morocco) during a ceremony at UNESCO Headquarters on 7 March 2018. Founded in 2005, the Prize recognises two outstanding projects that make innovative use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in education.
Audrey Azoulay, the Director-General of UNESCO, and Jawad bin Salem Al Arrayed, Deputy Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Bahrain, will open the award ceremony.
This year’s edition is dedicated to the "use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to increase access to quality education," with a view to promoting innovations in leveraging ICTs for achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal for education, SDG 4.
Both projects were designated on the recommendation of an international jury. Each winner will receive a monetary award (USD 25,000) and a diploma.
CLIx (The Connected Learning Initiative), India, developed by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, leverages ICTs to improve the chances of students from underserved communities to access secondary and higher education in India. It provides high quality platform-based, blended learning experiences in three languages: Hindi, Telugu and English. So far, the programme has reached 478 State high schools, 1,767 teachers and 46,420 students in four Indian States.
GENIE, Morocco was Launched in 2005, GENIE and it is a large-scale, long-term national policy and initiative developed and implemented by the Ministry of National Education and Vocational Training, Higher Education and Scientific Research of Morocco. It aims to incorporate ICT to improve access to, and quality of, education in primary and secondary schools. It incorporates key pillars for an effective national ICT in education policy such as infrastructure, teacher training, development of digital resources and transformation of teaching and learning practices.
It has provided infrastructure, digital devices and internet connectivity to more than 10,000 schools, and has promoted pedagogical innovations by providing more than 300,000 teachers and school administrators across the country with in-service training. It fosters the creative use of ICT to ensure an inclusive access to quality education in every school in the country and covers the four main languages used in education (Amazigh, Arabic, English and French). It has contributed to the increase of school enrollment in the country to 95% and works to increase its implementation so as to reduce the school dropout rate by 53%.
