Three award-winning ways to educate children
We’re excited to reveal the winners of the second round of the Theirworld Education Innovation Awards, who will receive masterclasses, mentoring and £80,000 scale-up grants.
What do these great ideas have in common? Free children’s books produced in a single day. A phone app packed with play-based classroom activities. A project to build creativity in children through technology.
They’re the winners of the second edition of the Theirworld Education Innovation Awards. A terrific trio of organisations will each receive masterclasses, one-to-one mentoring and £80,000 grants to help them expand their exciting and inspiring programmes to reach even more learners.
They are:
- Book Dash (South Africa)
- The Creative Kids Zone (Nigeria)
- Seenaryo Playkit (Lebanon and Jordan)
The winners were chosen by an expert panel looking for original and exciting programmes which Theirworld could support to scale up and deliver learning and skills to even more young people. The awards are open to non-profits, NGOs and charities.
“There’s a global gap in support and funding that lets exciting, proven education innovations scale up their impact,” said Angela Solomon, Theirworld’s Senior Advisor for Innovation, Projects and Research.
“We created Theirworld’s Education Innovation Awards to help meet that need – and we are so excited that our second cohort is so strong, innovative and passionately committed to achieving systems change for marginalised learners.”
Here’s a quick look at each of the winning programmes.
Book Dash
Young children in South Africa and other African countries need access to more books – but they’re often too expensive to buy from traditional publishers. Book Dash condenses the traditional publishing model into just 12 hours to make beautiful new books, thanks to creative writers, illustrators and designers who gather to volunteer their talent and time.
The passionate Book Dash team then works with partners to translate, print, distribute and make them available to as many children as possible from a young age. There are also free online versions.
Book Dash said: “We’re absolutely delighted about the opportunities this grant and support will open for us to enable further growth – and for the whole world to know about what we do.”
The Creative Kids Zone
The Creative Kids Zone (TCK Zone) is a Lagos-based non-profit that gives free technology training to thousands of children in African communities and makes them ambassadors for technology.
It creates training zones in schools and communities and introduces children to coding, design, robotics, artificial intelligence, game development, mobile apps, web development and other STEM fields.
TCK Zone said: “We see this as a validation of our efforts and a chance to showcase the impact we have made in empowering young students with digital skills.”
Seenaryo Playkit
This app (and website) has hundreds of play-based classroom activities for children aged three to eight. It includes games, songs and interactive stories in Arabic, English and French, along with classroom management ideas for teachers.
Designed to be used by schools, NGOs and community centres, it is currently available worldwide but being rolled out practically in Lebanon and Jordan. The makers believe it has the potential to become the leading classroom resource for teachers across Arab countries and beyond.
Seenaryo Playkit said: “We are excited. The grant money will help us reach teachers who would benefit from this and the mentorship could help us grow in the right direction.”
Learn more about Seenaryo Playkit
About the Education Innovation Awards
Theirworld launched the Education Innovation Awards in 2021. They were so successful that the winning programmes directly reached 37,000 marginalised children and indirectly impacted more than two million people.
Our latest winners applied for the second edition of the awards, launched earlier this year.
A third round of awards was launched in June, with an emphasis on bold, creative programmes that specifically target marginalised children in their early years. Those programmes will begin later this year.