World Innovation Summit for Education announces its 2009 WISE Awards winners

The WISE Awards capture the spirit and ethos of Qatar Foundation's new international educational initiative and aim to showcase, at a worldwide level, pioneering education-related projects that foster distinctive, cross-educational collaboration.

For this first edition, the contest was intended to reward concrete achievements across three categories, aligned with the Summit's main themes: pluralism, sustainability and innovation.

The six laureates will receive $20,000 each and were chosen in a highly competitive process that attracted global interest, generating 588 entries out of 6,000 downloaded applications.

The two-tier selection process involved a 15-member jury of internationally-renowned experts short-listing 48 projects, which were then reviewed by an international jury of 11 of the world's leading experts in pluralism, sustainability and innovation.

Entrants stood out from the four corners of the globe (Africa: 109, Asia/Oceania: 91, Europe: 80, North America: 55, Middle East: 34, Central and South and America: 25), with the majority of applications having an international dimension and application, further underlining the WISE Awards as a truly global initiative.

"The level of entries received for the first edition of the WISE Awards has helped to elevate this first initiative of the World Innovation Summit for Education, to the international stage. The submissions received give us a glimpse into the insightful and high-quality debates on education we can expect in Doha this November during WISE,"

said Dr. Abdulla bin Ali Al-Thani, Chairman of WISE, Vice President of Education, Qatar Foundation and Chairman of the WISE Awards International Jury, praising the effort and participation of all applicants.

The six laureates will be honoured at the first ever World Innovation Summit for Education, taking place in Doha from November 16th-18th. Each of the winners will be awarded a prize of $20,000 and present their projects before an audience of 1,000 leading international influencers during a gala dinner to be held on November 17th.

WISE Awards 2009 Winners:

- For the 'Pluralism' category:

Name: Sheetal Mehta; Country: India
Project: "Project Nanhi Kali"
Profile: A collaborative, national child sponsorship project to ensure that under-privileged girls in India receive 10 years of continuous, quality education.

Name: Vicky Colbert; Country: Colombia
Project: "Escuela Nueva"
Profile: A child-centered, community-based educational program making schools and schooling a new enterprise led by teachers.

- For the 'Sustainability' category:

Name: Martin Burt; Country: Paraguay
Project: "The Financially Self-P"
Profile: Transforming sons and daughters of chronically-poor farmers into "rural entrepreneurs," integrating the teaching of high-school subjects with the running of 17 small-scale rural enterprises, and covering the school's operating costs as a result.

Name: Joyce Dongotey-Padi; Country: Ghana
Project: "Widows Alliance Network (WANE) for Sustainable Economic Development in Ghana"
Profile: A network designed to emancipate and empower widows through employment skills, human rights education, reproductive health and social integration programmes.

- For the 'Innovation' category:

Name: Peter Levy; Country: USA
Project: "Curriki"
Profile: A Web 2.0-based platform that provides users with free tools and services necessary to develop, aggregate, evaluate and support Open Educational Resources (OER).

Name: Delio Morais; Country: Brazil
Project: "Distance Learning in the Amazon Forest"
Profile: An interactive distance learning solution that transmits and receives live, two-way audio/visual classes to 25,000 students in 700 classrooms across 300 schools in the State of Amazonas.