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 have 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.

Individuals, institutions and non-governmental organizations are invited to approach the National Commissions for UNESCO of their countries or NGOs in official partnerships with UNESCO and complete the online submission form.

Benefits

• Two recipients will receive a monetary award of US$ 25,000 each.
• The award will be presented at a ceremony in Paris

Eligibilities

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 long-term application;
• The project/activity should be a first time nomination for a Prize of this kind