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.
There are no partners at this time. Please check back later.
Developing a framework for integrating accessible ICTs into government guidelines and training instruction, and expanding teacher professional development.
Improving parent-school and parent-child relationships through the development of relevant reading materials for students and teaching aids for parents and educators
Improving first and second language reading skills of ethnic minority primary school children by supplying teachers and students with early grade, bilingual educational materials
Increasing the availability of culturally-responsive and context-relevant multilingual education materials in mother tongue languages for primary schools in Bandarban District, Bangladesh
Creating and distributing children-authored books in Creole to address the shortage of Creole reading materials and to foster a love of reading in children
Increasing the reading achievement levels of young learners through implementation of research-based, context-relevant literacy curricula and materials
Creating high-quality, mother-tongue materials through LubutoLiteracy, a low-cost digital platform that used local teachers to build lessons in seven languages
Using easy, computer-based instruction for literacy learning in primary schools, Bridges to the Future - South Africa, to help students hear, identify and manipulate phonemes
Utilizing a phonic and syllabic approach to reading in their mother tongue, Enlightening the Hearts Literacy Campaign accelerates students’ ability to develop a second language
Using the School Basic e-Learning Libraries (BeLLs), Ghana Reads introduces educational content for students and teachers to address the lack of high quality reading materials
Improving reading skills of children with special needs using by providing teaching and learning materials and assessment tools to teachers and resources and training for families
Conducting ‘Learn to Read, Read to Learn’ workshops to assist teachers in using innovative and digital learning materials and to help children improve their oral reading fluency
Influencing the Armenian education system by developing and testing a set of informal literacy assessments to better inform future literacy instruction
Using an early grade reading instruction curriculum (EGRIC), in print and electronic format, to provide teachers with high quality reading instruction materials and resources in English and Kiswahili
Developing reading benchmarks for new reading curriculum and a rapid reading response system (including the first literacy app in Khmer), to address reading difficulties for children in Cambodia
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