PARIS, March 2 (KUNA) -- The 2017 UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize will be awarded to projects from India and Morocco for their contribution to innovation in education, the UNESCO announced on Friday.
The awards will be officially made at UNESCO headquarters here on March 7 and each winner will receive a diploma and a USD 25,000 prize.
The award recognises two outstanding projects that make innovative use of information and communication technologies that can be used to improve education.
The Indian project, dubbed CLIX (Connected Learning Initiative), developed by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, provides multilingual access to education programmes via computer platforms and targets underserved communities and opens up a path for underprivileged students to obtain secondary and higher education in India.
So far, 46,420 students in 478 schools have benefitted from the CLIX programme.
The Moroccan laureates developed a system, called GENIE, which is implemented via the Ministry of National and Vocational Training in Morocco, to provide multilingual infrastucture and connectivity for more than 10,000 schools and it also provides teaching aids and pedagogical tools for 300,000 teachers in that country.
The programme has had a considerable impact on enrollment in Moroccan schools, which has increased by 95 percent, while drop-out rates have also been reduced by over 50 percent. (end) jk.mt