The UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa ICT in Education Prize recognizes innovative approaches in leveraging new technologies to expand educational opportunities by enabling access to quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all, in line with the Education 2030 agenda and Sustainable Development Goal 4.

Funded by the Kingdom of Bahrain and established in 2005, the Prize rewards individuals and organizations that are carrying out outstanding projects to improve teaching and learning in the digital age. It calls attention to excellent models, best practices and creative uses of ICTs to enhance overall education performance.

For the past years, the Prize has been promoting the use of new technologies to expand educational opportunities and increase access to quality education for vulnerable groups impeded by cultural and economic barriers, personal disabilities, gender inequalities, and/or crisis-affected situations. Indeed, ICT has a great potential to enable cost-efficient solutions to address these barriers, so that everyone can fully enjoy their right to education.

This year the Prize will highlight projects that use integrated solutions that blend commonly used technology with frontier ICT applications, such as breakthrough technology to overcome infrastructure barriers; solutions to reduce the cost of access; online learning innovations; intelligent learning management systems; machine translation; big data; and imagery technology.

Prize

• diploma
• USD 25,000
• acknowledgment during a ceremony at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris

Eligibility

• Governments of the Member States of UNESCO or an international non-governmental organization (NGO) in official partnership with UNESCO active in the field covered by the Prize.
• Each government or international NGO may not submit more than three nominations for any one edition of the Prize.
• A self-nomination cannot be considered.

Individuals, institutions or non-governmental organizations that have made outstanding innovation and significant contributions through projects to support and/or promote the creative use of ICT to ensure education for excluded vulnerable groups

The criteria below will be taken into consideration:

• Duration of projects/activities must be of at least one year to permit an assessment of results;
• Innovation and openness of content and tool;
• Evidence of sustainability for mid- to the long-term application;
• The project/activity should be a first time nomination for a Prize of this kind

Important Dates

• June 2018: Launch of call for nominations
• October 2018: Deadline for submission
• December 2018: International jury meeting
• March 2019: Award ceremony in Paris, France