Together, let's ensure the best ICT solutions reach children with disabilities around the world.
The Grand Challenge
More than 93 million children globally have a disability, and at least 90 percent of those residing in countries with high poverty levels do not attend school. A lack of suitable transportation and infrastructure, inadequate teacher training, insufficient learning support, and a dearth of quality learning resources prevent children with disabilities from attending or fully participating in school, leaving them further behind their peers’ academic and social development. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these challenges and deepened the need for quality Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions to support learning for all children in or out of school.
The Big Idea
The UnrestrICTed Challenge seeks expressions of interest from local and global solvers to scale ICT for education solutions that ensure children with disabilities benefit from language, literacy, and learning support grounded in Universal Design for Learning (UDL) at home and at school. Solvers will participate in a collaborative process to co-create forward-thinking ICT for education solutions that demonstrate the highest potential to improve language and literacy for children with disabilities in low-resource contexts.
Prize Partners
The ACR GCD Founding Partners thank the following organizations for their collaboration on this competition.
Developing a framework for integrating accessible ICTs into government guidelines and training instruction, and expanding teacher professional development.
Antura and the Letters app builds foundational literacy skills in Arabic and improves psychosocial well-being for Syrian children who are out of school or struggling in school.
Examining the use of the CLA approach when shifting from supporting innovators/innovations at pilot (or proof of concept) stage to transitioning mature, evidence-based solutions for scale.
The Grand Challenge is concluding 12 years of funding and testing innovative EdTech solutions and approaches to increase reading outcomes for marginalized children in low-resource contexts
The app, funded through the EduApp4Syria Prize, was nominated for and received awards celebrating innovation and achievements in the development process