Queen Rania Foundation takes part in global coalition to expand innovative learning solutions

AMMAN — The Queen Rania Foundation (QRF) recently partnered with the Los Angeles-based non-profit XPRIZE and various organisations to form a new impact coalition aimed at expanding the outreach and scope of educational technological innovations developed through the Global Learning XPRIZE.

A global competition launched during the UN General Assembly week in 2014, the XPRIZE challenges teams across the globe to develop open-source, scalable software to enable children with limited access to education to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic within 15 months, according to on XPRIZE representative.

The five finalists of the competition were announced in 2017 and awarded $1 million each to develop their innovative projects, while receiving the help of the United Nations’ Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the World Food Programme and the government of Tanzania to field test their solutions, an XPRIZE statement said.

Following the first field testing currently under way in eastern Tanzania, where some 4,000 children from 150 villages in the Tanga region were provided with Pixel C tablets to test the software solutions, each member of the Global Learning Impact Coalition will start an individual pilot in a specific target country.

The Queen Rania Foundation’s pilot aims to explore the potential use of mobile learning to support basic literacy and numeracy in Syrian refugee camps and Jordanian host communities, by investigating areas where education technology can have the most impact on children’s lives, whether in school, at home or at learning centres, according to Haifa Dia Al Attia, CEO of the QRF.

“Through this partnership, we aim to localise and pilot one of the XPRIZE finalists’ solutions, and to build on the momentum of other QRF mobile app initiatives in Arabic, Karim and Jana, with the aim of improving children’s numeracy skills,” she said, voicing the Queen Rania Foundation’s happiness to “partner with XPRIZE in their quest to achieve exponential change through innovation and in their vision to transform education and bring it to everyone”.

Among the other partners in the impact coalition are the global fund Education Cannot Wait, the Teach the World Foundation, Imagine Worldwide working in Malawi and the Global Alliance for Humanitarian Innovation.

“The goal of the coalition is to collect and share globally accessible datasets linked with open source software to enable anyone, anywhere, to learn from and build upon them,” the XPRIZE statement read, noting that by the end of the field testing phase in April 2019, the team whose solution enables the greatest proficiency gains in reading, writing and arithmetic will receive the grand prize of $10 million.

“This is a global movement to spark a revolution in learning. With our influential new partners, we will reach children from Jordan to Pakistan, in rural and urban communities, and in refugee camps —helping make the Global Learning XPRIZE truly global,” said director of education and impact for the Global Learning XPRIZE Emily Church, adding that “this next step demonstrates the power of partnerships to scale innovative educational technologies with the potential to impact billions of children”.

“As a world community, we have the money and finally the technology to solve this challenge — all we need now is to work together,” Church concluded.